Time Let Me Play • Quilt Finish 2023

Last night we had smoke from fires somewhere, but I never could figure out where. And so I gave up, because that’s what you do at the end of summer: you play it easy, play it nice. You take a breath. You don’t work too hard to find out things that don’t really matter. For nearly a week the temperatures here have felt like end-of-summer, with highs in the 70s and at night, lows that allow the window open.

This quilt is Time Let Me Play, the line taken from “Fern Hill,” a poem by the esteemed Dylan Thomas, where he describes his childhood from the vantage point of a grown man. He looks back, riffing, remembering and describing how he was king of the hill, lost in the verdant landscapes of his childhood Wales. I especially liked the repeating of the center lines of several stanzas:

1. Time let me hail and climb /  Golden in the heydays of his eyes, /
   And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
2. Time let me play and be /  Golden in the mercy of his means, /
   And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman
3. And playing, lovely and watery / And fire green as grass. / And nightly under the simple stars / As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away

Who is this personage that he refers to? It is Time, which gives him a chance to be “green” and “golden” — a reference perhaps to being young like a growing sprout, but also as a golden, or fair-haired and favorite child. The child is the “prince of the apple towns” and lord of the trees and leaves. He repeats “Time let me play” only once, but does refer to that necessary activity of youth, over and over.

Only at the end does Thomas allude to the ephemerality of what he has just described, when he says that Time held him both “green” and “dying,” giving hint to the arc of a day, of a season, the arc of a life.

And while I could go on forever, pulling out the ideas from this rich poem, I want to say tonight that I slipped out the door just at sunset, the sun climbing down from its throne in the sky, soon to slip down over the horizon. I had the quilt in my hands, and quickly clamped it up to the sprawling woody vines of our wisteria. I stepped back and took pictures as the golden light lit up the quilt.

The shadow of the leaves were soft smudgey shapes, a contrast to the crisp angles and simple lines of the quilt. The sun moved quickly and so did I, turning the quilt over to snap an image of the label, sewn on this afternoon.

I felt caught on the edge between day and night. And I am also caught on the edge of another shift of time: I am no longer that young child, climbing trees, playing as if it were the only thing to do in summer, drinking in the richness of clouds and dew and green and gold. But with cloth in my hands, I can still play once in a while, as that pure essence of a quilt — of color and line and shape and imagination — will still let me wander.

Time, let me play.
Again and again and again.

Quilt Details

Quilt #279 in my Quilt Index • 53″ square
Painters Palette Solids are from Paintbrush Studios
Magnifico thread is what I used for quilting, and that is made by Superior Threads
Designed, pieced and quilted by Elizabeth Eastmond (me!)
Pattern can be purchased in my Pattern Shop

Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Last words about the poem: I searched to understand what a nightjar was (found it), but that flying rick? Well, a rick was a name for a tall haystack, and I suppose the child falling asleep at Fern Hill might dream of flying nightjars and haystacks, just as the “owls” might “bear the farm away.”