Laburnum Top

(Ted Huges)

About the Poet

• Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire in 1930-died October 28, 1998, in London.
• After serving in the Royal Air Force, Hughes attended Cambridge, where he studied archaeology and anthropology, taking a particular interest in myths and legends.
• In 1956 he met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath.
• The Hawk in the Rain (1957) secured Hughes's reputation as a poet of international stature. 
• The Laburnum Top is a poem that talks about the reciprocation of the relationship between the Laburnum tree and the goldfinch bird. The laburnum tree gives shelter to the bird, and in return, the bird and its chicks keep the tree alive through their activities. Metaphorically, the tree and goldfinch also symbolize life and its fluctuations, body, and soul.

Theme: Life is a process of exchange, symbiosis. With the exchange of energy, we are alive. Relationship between atman and Maya/Soul and body. Life and its fluctuations. The cycle of life. The old life helps the young life by providing for it, and the young life, in turn, helps the old life by revitalizing it.

Tone: Still and peaceful, which changes into excitement in the succeeding stanza. In the last

stanza the tone is sad, and it has a sense of emptiness.

Form: Free verse, Animal symbolism. 

Rhyme Scheme: None

Summary:

The lifeless tree: At the beginning of the poem, one September afternoon, the top of the laburnum tree stands silent and still. Its leaves had turned yellow, and seeds had fallen.

Goldfinch makes it alive: The arrival of the goldfinch is sleek, smooth, alert, and abrupt like a lizard. It quickly enters the dense foliage, and it seems that a machine that had lain dormant was awakened. The tree has been compared to a machine. The bird's family, which was quite so far, begins to chirrup and twitch and generally create a commotion. The tree seems to have come alive as it seems to tremble and thrill with the movement of the bird and its family. The birds thus are the engine (metaphor) of the machine - the laburnum tree.

The tree subsidies to emptiness again: The goldfinch stokes this engine by feeding its family (stoking = feeding/ adding fuel to an engine). Once they have been fed, the goldfinch moves to the end of a branch peeping out such that only its face is visible in the yellowness of the tree. The face has black markings which make it seem like the bird is wearing a mask. She flies away into the vast infinite sky leaving the tree empty and once again, silent as it was.

Poetic devices:

Alliteration: September sun, tree tremble.

Simile- sleek as a lizard

Metaphor- 'engine of her family', 'machine'.

Personification: The whole tree trembles and thrills

Onomatopoeia: chirrup, chittering, trilling

Transferred Epithet- 'Her barred face identity mask'.