‘The Seven Sorrows’ by Ted Hughes

‘The Seven Sorrows’ (text)

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 a 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 beetle's 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 only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

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 year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

The ‘slow goodbye’ of the things is what disturbs the poet. The poet begins with the imagery from nature and finally moves on to death. He uses animal imagery, as is his trademark. Death imagery is there in the last stanza, although the “sun gathers the minutes of the evening” can also be linked to the last phase of life.
Regarding the sun, I am reminded of the following lines from Wordsworth’s Ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ in which the poet while describing the scene of the evening refers to the immortality and mortality of man:

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

The same is the case here. The sun does not signify death, rather it is the minutes of the evening that symbolically refer to the last stage of life, the last few moments “when the year packs up” (to put it into the words of Ted Hughes himself).
In the sixth stanza, the poet refers to a fact that we find just as true as any universal truth in our daily lives: ‘the sorrow of the fox is the joy of the huntsman and the joy of the hounds’. This is as true of life also – “when you cry, you cry alone”. Moreover, people are not concerned about others.
The last stanza mentions the sorrow of the old age – the wrinkled face looking out of the window, probably searching for the last moments of joy, the joy that evaded them for the whole of the their lives, which they spent not living for themselves. Life is short and their time fled away breathing in life for their offspring.