TWO love poems written in a 15-year-old girl’s school exercise book by the late poet laureate Ted Hughes have come to light after more than 50 years.

Hughes befriended the teenager Enid Wilkinson while on national service in the RAF and he would spend his off-duty evenings by the fire of her family home in the remote village of Patrington, near Hull, across the road from his billet.

While Enid was doing her homework at the kitchen table, Hughes, then 19, noticed an exercise book into which she had copied her favourite romantic poems.

“Ted picked up the book and said, ‘Shall I write you one of my poems?’,” Enid recalled last week. “Well, I’d no idea that he even wrote poems.

“I just loved them because they were romantic.”

Thrilled by the poems, Enid showed them to her English teacher at Malet Lambert grammar school who was less impressed: “He said that it was rubbish — that it was someone trying to emulate Shakespeare.”

In October 1951, after two years on national service, Hughes went up to Cambridge where he was to meet and later marry Sylvia Plath, the American poet who committed suicide in 1963.

Retired social worker Enid, 70, has now sold the poems for £2,000 to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which bought Hughes’s archive before he died in 1998 at the age of 68.

They are among the earliest poems he wrote: one is an early version of the poem, Song, which he included in his first collection in 1957, the other is previously unpublished.

Diane Middlebrook, author of Her Husband, a study of Hughes and Plath, described Song as “the most forthright love poem” Hughes wrote, in which “a young poet recalls how he witnessed the transformation of a woman into a Muse”.

The exercise book version also includes an extra verse.

The poet later wrote that he was inspired to write Song during his national service. He said the poem came to him “as such things should in your 19th year — literally a voice in the air at about 3am when I was on night duty”.

A family friend, Elizabeth Sigmund, said Hughes spoke about his time in the Patrington area as idyllic. “I think it was a sort of age of innocence, before going to university, when he was still a Yorkshire boy really, and he talked about that time in a very nostalgic way.”

Hughes’s biographer, Elaine Feinstein, believes the other poem also showed his early promise: “It is a slight poem, but unusually (good) for a 19-year-old boy.

“It is melodious, particularly in its choice of syllables; there is the occasional phrase . . . ‘all those ruined lovely things’ . . . or ‘the moon lies down with the west water’ that he might have been tempted to keep.”

Like Song, it too is a love poem in which a poet describes unrequited love.

Hughes signed the poem with the nonsense pseudonym of Eeple Jate Huckmwmer, Disciple of the Daemonic, Friend to George Daggitt, a young Irishman who was lodging at Enid’s home.

Feinstein believes this dedication was “in the spirit of WB Yeats’s magical dabblings and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess” — both favourites of Hughes.

Enid, who left school at 17 and married a mechanic, John Bates, before going to university to become a social worker, did not think Hughes or the other RAF conscripts took much notice of her.

“I used to iron their shirts for half a crown when they were going out,” she remembers. “I was only a little squib — he definitely seemed to be older than his age. I was just a schoolgirl.”

The poems Hughes wrote in the exercise book seemed at odds with his nature, Enid said.

“I always thought he was rather strange. I would say that he was morose most of the time. He was brooding: he didn’t really talk to you much.”

Hughes’s moodiness commanded attention, Enid noticed. “He had this flop of hair and was tall and very slim. I don’t ever remember him smiling very much.” But Hughes proved popular with girls in the village, two of whom, Margaret Rhind and Hilda Norris, he took out. He described the latter to Enid as having “eyes like a tiger”.

When later in life Enid read poems by Hughes about animals and nature she was surprised by how different they were: “I thought that he was a love poet.”

She and Hughes did not stay in touch, although her children studied his poetry at school and she followed his career. George Daggitt and his wife Mary passed on news and sent her a copy of the order of service from Hughes’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey.

“It is a welcome event when a lost manuscript comes to light,” said Stephen Enniss, director of special collections at Emory University. “These poems give us a glimpse of Hughes’s first steps on the road to becoming one of the major poets of his generation.”

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