The Laburnum Top

In Ted Hughes' poem 'The Laburnum Top', the top of a laburnum tree is silent and still in the yellow September sunlight. A few leaves are turning yellow, and all its seeds have fallen.

Then a goldfinch arrives, with a twitching chirrup: a suddenness, a startlement, at the end of a branch. Sleek as a lizard, alert and abrupt, she slips into the thick leaves, where her nest is.

At once, it is as if a machine starts up: her nestlings greet her with chitterings, a tremor of wings, and trillings. The whole tree trembles and thrills. The mother bird is 'the engine of her family': she brings it to life, just as an engine drives a machine. She stokes it full, feeding her young, as one stokes a fire with fuel.

Then she flicks out to the end of a branch, showing her barred face like an identity mask, and with eerie, delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings, she launches away towards the infinite.

'And the laburnum subsides to empty.' The poem ends as still as it began: stillness, a burst of life, stillness again. The poem is full of sound words (chirrup, chitterings, trillings, whisperings), and its main colour is yellow: the sunlight, the leaves, and the goldfinch itself.