AN UNPUBLISHED nonsense poem written by the late Ted Hughes when he was a schoolboy at Mexborough Grammar School has come to light.
It reveals an imaginative Yorkshire lad with a sophisticated vocabulary and a sense of the ridiculous, hinting at his later fascination with animals and the dark forces of nature. The Zeet Saga or Pale tale I, an accomplished three-page poem of 22 quatrains, may be his earliest surviving important poem, along with Wild West, the long narrative poem that he wrote for his school magazine in 1946, aged 15.
The date of the unpublished poem is unclear. The