English (Core) · Ch 5 — The Laburnum Top
Summary
Summary
- Poet: Ted Hughes — a leading English poet and Poet Laureate, famous for nature and animal poems.
- Setting: A garden on a still, yellow September afternoon.
- Beginning: The laburnum tree's top is silent and quite still — leaves yellowing, seeds fallen; it seems lifeless.
- The turning point: A goldfinch arrives with a twitching chirp — sudden, startling, "sleek as a lizard" — and enters the thick leaves.
- The tree comes alive: "A machine starts up" of chirpings, wing-tremors and trillings; the whole tree "trembles and thrills". She is the "engine of her family", feeding her young.
- Departure: Showing her "barred face identity mask", the goldfinch launches away "towards the infinite".
- Ending: The laburnum "subsides to empty" — silent and still once more, as at the start.
- Devices: Simile ("sleek as a lizard"), metaphor (machine/engine), onomatopoeia (chirrup, chitterings, trillings), alliteration ("trembles and thrills"), personification, vivid yellow imagery. …