Yes, I think Roger has it right: "Almost no poetry is thoroughly happy." That reminds me of the joke about the man who complained bitterly about the food at his boarding house, because "it's so bad, and there's so little of it." That contradiction is at the heart of a dissatisfaction with life that is unreasoning and pretty much universal: we agree that it's full of trouble, and wish there were more of it.
The longing for childhood--or youth, or lost loves, or you name it--is the "so little of it" part of the complaint, the eternal desire for what's still missing or already gone, like Paradise or mornings on "Fern Hill," not because of its perfection (which we don't really know anything about) but because of its goneness, which allows us to gild it in retrospect.
Thomas's trick to writing a good poem about this is not to believe all of what he's saying, even while the gilding is going on, so that the apparent nostalgia falls apart eventually and becomes the truth almost against its own wishes: "I sang (because I didn't know any better!) in my chains (which I've always worn) like the sea (which isn't free either)."
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