New Hughes poem tells of Plath death

A previously unpublished poem has been discovered in which the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes recalls the day in which he is told: "Your wife is dead."

It was unearthed by Lord Bragg in the British Library and different drafts show how Hughes tried to perfect the poem, which deals with the three days leading up to the suicide of Sylvia Plath, his estranged wife, in 1963.

Lord Bragg described the poem, entitled "Last Letter", as the missing keystone of Birthday Letters, the collection of poems by Hughes addressed to Plath that was published in 1998, the year in which he died, and was posthumously awarded the Whitbread Prize.