The Laburnum Top — Class 11 English

Ted Hughes's short poem captures a vivid moment of life and energy in nature centred on a laburnum tree and a goldfinch. The poem opens with the laburnum top standing silent and quite still in the yellow September afternoon sunlight, a few leaves yellowing and all its seeds fallen — an image of stillness, fading and near-lifelessness. This calm is suddenly broken when a goldfinch arrives with a twitching chirrup, a startling abruptness at a branch-end. Sleek as a lizard, alert and abrupt, she enters the thickness of the tree, and at once a "machine starts up" of chitterings, a tremor of wings and trillings, so that the whole tree trembles and thrills with sound and movement. The bird is compared to the engine of her family, which she stokes — that is, she feeds her chicks hidden in the tree. Showing her "barred face identity mask," she then launches away with an eerie, delicate whistle-chirrup towards the infinite, and the laburnum subsides once more to emptiness and silence. The poem thus moves in a circular structure from stillness to vibrant activity and back to stillness, celebrating the brief, electric burst of life the bird brings to the tree and using rich sound, colour and movement imagery.