In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means.

These lines are from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill,” a lyric recollection of childhood summers spent on a relative’s farm in west Wales (often associated with his aunt’s farm near Llangain, Carmarthenshire). Written in the mid-1940s and published in Thomas’s 1946 collection *Deaths and Entrances*, the poem looks back from adulthood on a time when the speaker felt nature, play, and time itself were benevolent. The quoted stanza belongs to the poem’s opening movement, where Thomas establishes the pastoral setting and the illusion of childhood freedom before the later turn toward time’s inescapable passing.

The speaker remembers childhood as a brief, radiant condition: “the sun … young once only” suggests that youth is singular and unrepeatable. Time is personified as a permissive guardian—“Time let me play and be”—granting the child a temporary license to exist without self-consciousness. “Golden in the mercy of his means” implies that this freedom is not earned but bestowed, and also limited: Time’s “mercy” has boundaries, and its “means” will eventually withdraw the gift. The lines encapsulate the poem’s central tension between pastoral innocence and the later knowledge that time’s generosity is fleeting.