Class 11 English · Original EZT practice
The Laburnum Top - Ted Hughes (Class 11 English, Hornbill, Poem 2)
The Laburnum Top is Poem 2 of Class 11 Hornbill (pp. 30-31), Ted Hughes's account of a tree woken by a bird. At the start 'The Laburnum top is silent, quite still / In the afternoon yellow September sunlight'; then the goldfinch arrives - 'a suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end' - and 'The whole tree trembles and thrills', until she 'launches away, towards the infinite / And the laburnum subsides to empty.' This page reads the poem's stillness, noise and movement, and the tree the poem calls 'the engine of her family', with fresh practice questions. (Note: this is original practice, not a textbook exercise key.)
6 original worked examples, 6 fresh self-check questions and 4 mixed questions, with explained answers. These are not copied textbook exercises, an official chapter index or a full answer key. No affiliation with NCERT is claimed.
Official sources for topic and edition context, checked 25 October 2026:
1. The poem at a glance
The stillness: 'The Laburnum top is silent, quite still / In the afternoon yellow September sunlight, / A few leaves yellowing, all its seeds fallen.' The arrival: 'Till the goldfinch comes, with a twitching chirrup / A suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end.' The entry: 'Then sleek as a lizard, and alert, and abrupt, / She enters the thickness, and a machine starts up / Of chitterings, and a tremor of wings, and trillings' - 'The whole tree trembles and thrills.' The reason: 'It is the engine of her family. / She stokes it full' - the noise is her brood, and she is feeding it. The look: 'then flirts out to a branch-end / Showing her barred face identity mask'. The departure: 'Then with eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings / She launches away, towards the infinite / And the laburnum subsides to empty.'
2. Key details and what they signal
The season: 'yellow September sunlight', yellowing leaves, 'all its seeds fallen' - the tree is at the end of its year, which is why the bird's arrival feels like a brief second life. Sound as the poem's engine: 'a twitching chirrup', 'chitterings', 'a tremor of wings, and trillings', 'eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings' - the goldfinch is heard before, during and after she is seen. 'She stokes it full': the bird feeds the tree's noise the way you feed fuel to an engine - the family inside is the machine she serves. The book's own glosses: the laburnum is 'a short tree with hanging branches, yellow flowers and poisonous seeds'; the goldfinch 'a small singing bird with yellow feathers on its wings'. The branch-end habit: she arrives 'at a branch end' and flirts out 'to a branch-end' - the edge of the tree is her stage, never the open sky. 'Subsides to empty': when she launches away 'towards the infinite', the tree sinks back - not just silent again, but emptied.
3. Theme
Life inside stillness: the quiet tree turns out to be full of a family; stillness is only what we see before we look properly. A complete arc in seconds: arrival, eruption, departure - the poem holds a whole event and its vanishing in fifteen lines. The visitor and the host: the tree exists, in the poem's eyes, as 'the engine of her family' - a being defined by what it shelters. Attention as the subject: nothing happens here except that someone watched one bird closely enough to catch her 'barred face identity mask'. Sound carrying movement: the poem's energy is mostly noise - chirrup to chitterings to whisperings - until the silence comes back.
Choose, solve, check, then try a fresh question.
Before calculating, read the method prompt and name the condition that makes it useful. Write your own attempt. Open the steps only when you need them, and use the check to catch a wrong sign, unit or interpretation. Finish with the fresh question before reading its answer.
Hold the opening stillness
Choose the method: Silent, then sunlight.
EZT practice question
What season and time of day does the poem fix, and which details set them?
Show the worked solution
- The hour: 'In the afternoon yellow September sunlight'.
- The season: 'A few leaves yellowing, all its seeds fallen' - late September, the year's end.
- The state: 'The Laburnum top is silent, quite still' - stillness doubled.
Answer: A late-September afternoon: 'yellow September sunlight', leaves 'yellowing', 'all its seeds fallen' - and the tree 'silent, quite still' before anything happens.
Check: September, afternoon, yellowing leaves, fallen seeds.
Watch for this: Do not read the stillness as emptiness - the poem will show the tree was full all along; the stillness is only what we see before we look.
Now try it yourself
Why does the poem need the seeds to be fallen?
Check your answer
Fallen seeds close the tree's own year - so the goldfinch's family arriving inside it reads as a borrowed second life, not the tree's own season.
The timing makes the bird a visitation.
Catch the arrival
Choose the method: Chirrup, then startlement.
EZT practice question
Which words make the goldfinch's entrance feel sudden?
Show the worked solution
- The sound first: 'a twitching chirrup' - she is heard before she is seen.
- The landing: 'A suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end'.
- The body: 'sleek as a lizard, and alert, and abrupt' - three strikes in one line.
Answer: 'A twitching chirrup', then 'A suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end' - she is on the tree before the sentence has settled.
Check: The chirrup, the suddenness, the branch end.
Watch for this: Do not picture a gentle drifting-in - 'startlement' makes the tree itself startle; the arrival is an event that happens to the whole scene.
Now try it yourself
Why compare the bird to a lizard rather than another bird?
Check your answer
The lizard gives her movement, not flight - sleek, alert, abrupt, a darting body slipping into thickness rather than soaring over it.
The simile trades wings for quickness.
Start the machine
Choose the method: Thickness, then trillings.
EZT practice question
Once she is inside the thickness, which sounds does the poem stack up?
Show the worked solution
- The entry: 'She enters the thickness, and a machine starts up'.
- The stack: 'Of chitterings, and a tremor of wings, and trillings'.
- The total: 'The whole tree trembles and thrills.'
Answer: 'Chitterings', 'a tremor of wings', 'trillings' - until 'The whole tree trembles and thrills.'
Check: Chitterings, tremor, trillings, the whole tree.
Watch for this: Do not credit the visible bird - she is hidden in the thickness; the poem builds her entirely out of sound and the tree's shaking.
Now try it yourself
Why call the bird-filled tree 'a machine'?
Check your answer
A machine starts up all at once and runs as one thing - the image turns separate chicks and wings into a single humming mechanism with the mother as its operator.
The metaphor makes the family an engine.
Feed the engine
Choose the method: Stokes, then mask.
EZT practice question
What does the goldfinch do between entering the tree and leaving it?
Show the worked solution
- The reason she came: 'It is the engine of her family. / She stokes it full' - the noise is her brood, and she is feeding it.
- The emergence: 'then flirts out to a branch-end'.
- The look: 'Showing her barred face identity mask'.
Answer: 'She stokes it full, then flirts out to a branch-end / Showing her barred face identity mask' - she feeds the brood, then shows herself at the edge.
Check: Stokes, flirts, branch-end, identity mask.
Watch for this: Do not miss the fuel image inside 'stokes' - the bird feeds the tree's noise the way you feed fuel to an engine; the family is the machine she serves.
Now try it yourself
Why does the poem call her markings an 'identity mask'?
Check your answer
The bars on her face read as a disguise that is also her identity - the goldfinch is most herself when masked, hidden in plain sight at the branch end.
The mask is her signature.
Keep to the branch end
Choose the method: Edge, then edge.
EZT practice question
Where in the tree does the goldfinch appear, and what does that habit signal?
Show the worked solution
- The arrival point: 'at a branch end'.
- The exit point: 'flirts out to a branch-end'.
- The signal: the edge of the tree is her stage, never the open sky - she keeps to cover even while showing herself.
Answer: She arrives 'at a branch end' and flirts out 'to a branch-end' - the edge of the tree is her stage, never the open sky.
Check: Branch end twice, never the open sky.
Watch for this: Do not treat the repetition as accident - the poem lands on 'branch end' at both ends of her visit; the edge is where her hidden life briefly surfaces.
Now try it yourself
What does 'flirts out' add that 'comes out' would not?
Check your answer
'Flirts' makes the appearance a performance - brief, teasing, half-offered; she shows herself on her own terms and withdraws.
The verb keeps the bird in charge of her visibility.
Empty the tree
Choose the method: Whisperings, then empty.
EZT practice question
How does the goldfinch leave, and what happens to the laburnum then?
Show the worked solution
- The sound: 'Then with eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings'.
- The launch: 'She launches away, towards the infinite'.
- The remainder: 'And the laburnum subsides to empty.'
Answer: 'With eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings / She launches away, towards the infinite', and 'the laburnum subsides to empty.'
Check: The whisperings, the infinite, subsides to empty.
Watch for this: Do not read the ending as a return to the first line - 'silent, quite still' was peace; 'subsides to empty' is loss, the tree drained of the family it held.
Now try it yourself
Why 'towards the infinite' rather than naming a direction?
Check your answer
The bird exits the poem's scale - the tree's world was whole and small; she leaves for what the tree and the poem cannot contain.
The infinite dwarfs the laburnum on purpose.
Try a mixed set
Choose a method or explanation before opening each answer.
1. The opening state?
Show answer and reason
'Silent, quite still' in 'yellow September sunlight', seeds fallen.
Stillness before the visit.
2. The arrival words?
Show answer and reason
'A suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end.'
She is heard before she is seen.
3. Why the noise?
Show answer and reason
'It is the engine of her family. / She stokes it full.'
The machine is the brood.
4. The ending?
Show answer and reason
'She launches away, towards the infinite / And the laburnum subsides to empty.'
Loss, not just silence.
Try it yourself
Work these on paper before checking any notes. Answers are deliberately not shown here.
- In two sentences, trace the poem's sound sequence from 'a twitching chirrup' to 'whistle-chirrup whisperings' and say what it carries.
- Contrast the tree before and after the visit - 'silent, quite still' against 'subsides to empty' - and say what changed.
- Explain in your own words why 'It is the engine of her family' is the poem's central image.
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Questions about this practice page
- Who wrote The Laburnum Top?
- Ted Hughes. The Hornbill text credits him under the title and carries no biographical note, so this page stays with what the poem itself shows.
- What is The Laburnum Top about?
- A laburnum tree standing silent in September sunlight; a goldfinch arriving to feed her hidden brood, filling the tree with chitterings and trillings; and her departure, after which the tree 'subsides to empty.'
- What does 'the laburnum subsides to empty' mean at the end?
- The tree sinks back into stillness once the bird has gone - not merely quiet again but emptied, as if the family and the noise were its contents and she has taken them with her.
- What kind of tree is a laburnum?
- The book's own gloss calls it 'a short tree with hanging branches, yellow flowers and poisonous seeds' - an ornamental whose yellow matches both the September light and the goldfinch's wing feathers.
- Where is The Laburnum Top in the Class 11 book?
- Poem 2 of Hornbill, the Class 11 English textbook (pp. 30-31 by the current NCERT contents page). The book's notes say it follows a text with plant-name references for thematic sequencing; page numbers can differ between printings, so check your own copy.