Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Can anyone quote the entire text of Ted Hughes poem Daffodils from Birthday Letters?

This is the only part I have:



Daffodils



Remember how we picked the daffodils? Nobody else remembers, but I remember....

Our lives were still a raid on our good luck

We knew we'd live forever

We had not learned

What a fleeting glance of the everlasting

Daffodils are. Never identified

The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera

Our own days!

Can anyone quote the entire text of Ted Hughes poem Daffodils from Birthday Letters?
Daffodils





Remember how we picked the daffodils?

Nobody else remembers, but I remember.

Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,

Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.

She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.

It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.

Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,

Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot

(It was his last chance,

He would die in the same great freeze as you) ,

He persuaded us. Every Spring

He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,

'A custom of the house'.



Besides, we still weren't sure we wanted to own

Anything. Mainly we were hungry

To convert everything to profit.

Still nomads-still strangers

To our whole possession. The daffodils

Were incidental gilding of the deeds,

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. Never identified

The nuptial flight of the rarest epherma-

Our own days!

We thought they were a windfall.

Never guessed they were a last blessing.

So we sold them. We worked at selling them

As if employed on somebody else's

Flower-farm. You bent at it

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.



We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter's bench,

Distributed leaves among the dozens-

Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered-

Propped their raw butts in bucket water,

Their oval, meaty butts,

And sold them, sevenpence a bunch-



Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,

With their odourless metals,

A flamy purification of the deep grave's stony cold

As if ice had a breath-



We sold them, to wither.

The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.

Finally, we were overwhelmed

And we lost our wedding-present scissors.



Every March since they have lifted again

Out of the same bulbs, the same

Baby-cries from the thaw,

Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers

In the draughty wings of the year.

On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering

They return to forget you stooping there

Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,

Snipping their stems.



But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.

Here somewhere, blades wide open,

April by April

Sinking deeper

Through the sod-an anchor, a cross of rust.



Ted Hughes


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