Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Edward James Hughes, also known as Ted Hughes, who was an English poet

and translator who lived from 1930 to 1998. He served as poet laureate from 1984 until his death.

Hughes was married famously to Sylvia Plath from 1956 until she died in 1963.

So some of you may know his name from that.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Seven Sorrows. It goes like this. The first sorrow of autumn is the slow goodbye of the

garden who stands so long in the evening. A brown poppy head, the stalk of a lily, and still cannot go.

The second sorrow is the empty feet of the pheasant who hangs from a the stalk of a lily and still cannot go.

The second sorrow is the empty feet of the pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.

The woodland of gold is folded in feathers with its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow is the slow goodbye of the sun

who has gathered the birds and who gathers the minutes of evening, the golden and holy ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow is the pond gone black, ruined and sunken the city of water, the Beatles Palace, the catacombs of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow is the slow goodbye of the woodland that

quietly breaks up its camp. One day it's gone. It has left only litter, firewood, tent pulls.

And the sixth sorrow is the fox's sorrow, the joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds, the hooves that pound till earth closes her ear to the fox's prayer.

And the seventh sorrow is the slow goodbye of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window as the ear packs up like a tattie fairground that came for the children.

There's a lot going on in this poem.

The repetitive nature and structure of it of these seven stanzas is sort of comforting in a way uh, comforting in a way, you know, it's something to latch

onto like, uh, like the, the old epic poems where the, this certain, um, epitaphs and

things like that would cue with the storyteller into what was coming next. It was like a memory,

a memory tool.

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