About the author of the laburnum top
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Edward James ‘Ted’ Hughes was a Modern English poet and critics ranked him as one of the best poets of the period. Among the important poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, Ted Hughes’ special contribution to English poetry lies in the creation of a poetic world with a central interest in wild animals and birds. His poetic inspiration is born out of and focused on the peculiar but intimate influence that animals of forests, trees and the sky have on a sensitive human spirit.
“The Laburnum Top” is a very powerful poem in which the laburnum symbolizes the hardships in life. The poem describes the laburnum tree whose seeds have not only fallen but also the leaves have turned yellow. It is an afternoon in September and the tree top is silent until a goldfinch appears. As soon as the goldfinch appears, there is a sudden strong tremor in the tree; there are noises of twitching of wings and chirping in bird language. The whole tree trembles. The engine of the bird’s family has appeared that is the mother goldfinch has brought food for her babies. The movement of the goldfinch is like a lizard, sleek and smooth. She is the engine of her family, which means she is working to provide nutrition to the family just like the engine is the major part of a machine.
In the end, the goldfinch again launches herself in the sky in a mysterious way and the laburnum is reduced to silence and emptiness again.
Ted Hughes, byname of Edward J. Hughes, (born August 17, 1930, Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England—died October 28, 1998, London), English poet whose most characteristic verse is without sentimentality, emphasizing the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines.
At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern that was reflected in a number of his poems. In 1956 he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple moved to the United States in 1957, the year that his first volume of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, was published. Other works soon followed, including the highly praised Lupercal (1960) and Selected Poems (1962, with Thom Gunn, a poet whose work is frequently associated with Hughes’s as marking a new turn in English verse).
Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for nearly three years following Plath’s suicide in 1963 (the couple had separated the previous year), but thereafter he published prolifically, with volumes of poetry such as Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Wolfwatching (1989), and New Selected Poems, 1957–1994 (1995). In his Birthday Letters (1998), he addressed his relationship with Plath after decades of silence. As the executor of her estate, Hughes also edited and published several volumes of her work in the period 1965–98, but he was accused of censoring her writings after he revealed that he had destroyed several journals that she had written before her suicide.
Hughes wrote many books for children, notably The Iron Man (1968; also published as The Iron Giant; film 1999). Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world of his childhood, is one of many publications he created in collaboration with photographers and artists. He translated Georges Schehadé’s play The Story of Vasco from the original French and shaped it into a libretto. The resulting opera, from which significant portions of his text were cut, premiered in 1974. A play based on Hughes’s original libretto was staged in 2009. His works also include an adaptation of Seneca’s Oedipus (1968), nonfiction (Winter Pollen, 1994), and translations. He edited many collections of poetry, such as The Rattle Bag (1982, with Seamus Heaney). A collection of his correspondence, edited by Christopher Reid, was released in 2007 as Letters of Ted Hughes. A selection of his poems concerning animal life was published as A Ted Hughes Bestiary (2014). In 1984 Hughes was appointed Britain’s poet laureate.