Limpid and black?
Crow's eye-pupil, in the tower of its scorched fort.
1970
Daffodils
Remember how we1 picked the daffodils? Nobody else remembers, but I remember. Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy, Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
5 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,
IO 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
is Anything. Mainly we were hungry To convert everything to profit. Still nomads?still strangers To our whole possession. Th e daffodils Were incidental gilding of the deeds,2
20 Treasure trove. They simply came, An d they kept on coming. As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
1. Cf. 'Burning burning burning burning,' line can poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). 308 of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, where it is quoted 2. Document establishing legal possession of a from the Buddha's Fire Sermon. house. 1. Hughes is addressing his first wife, the Ameri
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2600 / TED HUGHES
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck. We knew we'd live for ever. We had not learned
25 What a fleeting glance of the everlasting Daffodils are. Never identified The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera3? Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall. Never guessed they were a last blessing.
30 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
35 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,
40 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?
45 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.
50 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
55 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
60 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
65 Sinking deeper Through the sod?an anchor, a cross of rust.
3. Insect that lives only a few days.
.
2601
HAROLD PINTER
b. 1930 Harold Pinter is one of the most original and challenging of the many important playwrights who have emerged in Britain in the last half-century. He was born and educated in East London, studied briefly at the Academy of Dramatic Art, and from the age of nineteen to the age of twenty-seven acted in a repertory company. His first play (in one act), The Room, was written and produced in 1957 and was followed immediately by The Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party, his first real success. In addition to his prize-winning work for theater and television, he has written a number of screenplays based on novels such as Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; his screenplays were collected and published in three volumes in 2000.
Pinter's early work shows the influence of Samuel Beckett and of absurdist drama, notably that of the French playwright Eugene lonesco, but his vision rapidly established itself as more naturalistic (though no less alarming) than theirs. His territory is typically a room (refuge, prison cell, trap) symbolic of its occupants' world. Into this, and into their ritualized relationship with its rules and taboos, comes a stranger on to whom?as on to a screen?the occupants project their deepest desires, guilts, neuroses. The breakdown that follows is mirrored in the breakdown of language. Pinter, who has a poet's ear for the rhythms of spoken English, is a master of the pauses, double entendres, and silences that communicate a secondary level of meaning often opposed to the first. He has said of language:
The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. Whe n true silence falls we are left
