The poem "Fern Hill", by Dylan Thomas, is being told by a speaker who is recalling his youthful past. Many images, symbols, and metaphors increase the depth of the speaker's message to the reader.
An image that is spoke about alot in the poem is the color of gold. Gold is usually used with youthful objects. Gold represents vibrance. Vibrance is usually associated with youth. Gold appears in the following locations:
"Golden in the heydays of his eyes"
"Trail with daisies and barley"
"Golden in the mercy of his means,"
"And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves"
"And the sun grew round that very day."
"In the sun born over and over,"
"Before the children green and golden"

A symbol in the poem occurs: "And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns." Princes are those who have a lot of political and social power. What separates them from kings, is that princes are generally young, at least younger than their fathers.
Many metaphors concerning the opposite of youth, aging, are located in the entirety of the last stanza of the poem.
" 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."
"In the moon that is always rising" reveals that the speaker has experiances what seems like countless days and nights. "The childless land" means that where the speaker was before, everyone has grown up by now. "Though I sang in my chains like the sea." The chains of old age are slowing the speaker down; he is becoming older and slower like the sea. This last part of the poem is a kind of coming back to reality for the speaker. The realization that his youthful days are over, but has fond memories of when he was young.