Ted Hughes was an English poet, playwright and children's writer who served as Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.
Ted Hughes
Wolfwatching
Faber & Faber, 1989.
In the title poem of this volume a young wolf, with 'Asiatic eyes, the gunsights / Aligned effortless in the beam of his power', lies 'bored easy' in the Zoo enclosure beside the Broad Walk:
...He's waiting
For the chance to live, then he'll be off.
Meanwhile the fence, and the shadow-flutter
Of moving people, and the roller-coaster
Roar of London surrounding, are temporary...
Birthday Letters
Faber & Faber, 1998.
In February 1963, soon after moving to a flat in Primrose Hill, the author's estranged wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, killed herself. She left two small children. The poems in this collection are addressed to her. This is from Life After Death:
We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay...
Hughes evidently felt a strong affinity with wolves. Earlier in the poem he speaks of
your son's eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic/Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes...
- an echo of the 'Asiatic eyes' of the young wolf in Wolfwatching.