FOR SYLVIA

Here is a poem by Ted Hughes. I've just given you the centre of the second stanza and part of the third . It was published in his collection Birthday Letters in 1998, when he was Poet Laureate of England. The poems in this book are about his relationship to his late wife Sylvia Plath.

Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we'd live forever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are.

In the rain of that April-your last April.
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks-
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.