“Full Moon and Little Frieda” begins on what the speaker calls a “cool small evening” in the English countryside. The night has “shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket”—a metaphor that suggests the dark is falling. It’s easier now to hear these sounds than it is to see their sources. But the metaphorical smallness of this evening also hints that the evening feels perfectly ordinary; this not a grand occasion, just another little night among many. Soon, though, this night will swell into something strange and wonderful. This will be a poem about a rediscovery of loveliness, in which a night that feels as if it has “shrunk” opens up into something greater.
That transformation will come through the “listening” ears and watching eyes of “Little Frieda,” the person to whom this poem is addressed. This is an autobiographical poem: Frieda Hughes is Ted Hughes’s daughter, and the speaker is Hughes himself, describing an evening when his child was very small—perhaps no more than a toddler. Hughes tells the story in the present tense, bringing readers into the immediacy of his memory.
On this cool small evening, Hughes observes, Frieda is “listening.” A mere dog bark and bucket clank are enough to perk up her ears; to a person who’s little and new to the world, the evening must feel rather less “small” than it does to her father. Readers might imagine the father holding the daughter on his hip and watching as she listens intently to the night.
The shape of this poem helps to capture Frieda’s alertness and fascination. Listen to the way these first two lines move:
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket—
And you listening.
The long first line feels easy and matter-of-fact: the speaker simply describes what’s there to be heard in the night. The strikingly short second line thus feels concentrated, in more senses than one. Frieda’s listening, conveyed in a mere three words, takes up a full line of its own, reflecting how fully absorbed Frieda is in what she can hear. The three-word line coming after the much longer line evokes an intense quiet, as if Frieda’s listening creates a hush around her. And the simple power of those three words suggests that Hughes is as absorbed in Frieda as Frieda is in her surroundings.
The shape of these lines also matches the world the speaker has described. Like the night, the poem shrinks here, condensing down around Frieda as if she’s at the very center of the world.
All across this short poem, Hughes’s flexible free verse (poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or a meter) will similarly shapeshift, changing its form and rhythms to capture the atmosphere of this cool small evening.