About the Poet and the Poem

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was one of the most celebrated English poets of the twentieth century and served as Britain's Poet Laureate. He is especially famous for his poems about nature, birds and animals, in which he watches the natural world with an unusually sharp and physical eye and captures its energy in vivid, muscular language.

"The Laburnum Top" is a short nature poem that catches a single, ordinary moment in a garden on a still September afternoon. A laburnum tree stands completely silent and lifeless — its leaves yellowing, its seeds fallen — until a goldfinch flies in to feed her young hidden in the branches. For a few seconds the whole tree bursts into sound and movement, alive with the chirping and fluttering of the bird's family. Then the goldfinch flies off again and the tree sinks back into stillness and emptiness.

Through this tiny episode Hughes shows how a living creature can fill a lifeless thing with energy, and how deeply the life of the tree and the life of the bird depend on each other.