The Thought Fox’ and the poetry of Ted Hughes summary and analysis and themes

Ted Hughes‟ “The Thought Fox”

‘The Thought Fox’ and the poetry of Ted Hughes

RICHARD WEBSTER

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The Critical Quarterly, 1984

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THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
 

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near

Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

 

THE ‘THOUGHT-FOX’ HAS often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realised and artistically satisfying of the poems in Ted Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain. At the same time it is one of the most frequently anthologised of all Hughes’s poems. In this essay I have set out to use what might be regarded as a very ordinary analysis of this familiar poem in order to focus attention on an aspect of Hughes’s poetry which is sometimes neglected. My particular interest is in the underlying puritanism of Hughes’s poetic vision and in the conflict between violence and tenderness which seems to be directly engendered by this puritanism.

‘The thought-fox’ is a poem about writing a poem. Its external action takes place in a room late at night where the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is starless, silent, and totally black. But the poet senses a presence which disturbs him:

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near

Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness.

The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night, for the night is itself a metaphor for the deeper and more intimate darkness of the poet’s imagination in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines; it is not seen but felt – frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet’s task is to coax it out of formlessness and into fuller consciousness by the sensitivity of his language. The remote stirrings of the poem are compared to the stirrings of an animal – a fox, whose body is invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously through the dark undergrowth:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

The half-hidden image which is contained within these lines is of soft snow brushing against the trees as it falls in dark flakes to the ground. The idea of the delicate dark snow evokes the physical reality of the fox’s nose which is itself cold, dark and damp, twitching moistly and gently against twig and leaf. In this way the first feature of the fox is mysteriously defined and its wet black nose is nervously alive in the darkness, feeling its way towards us. But by inverting the natural order of the simile, and withholding the subject of the sentence, the poet succeeds in blurring its distinctness so that the fox emerges only slowly out of the formlessness of the snow. Gradually the fox’s eyes appear out of the same formlessness, leading the shadowy movement of its body as it comes closer:  

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow. ..
 

In the first two lines of this passage the rhythm of the verse is broken by the punctuation and the line-endings, while at the same time what seemed the predictable course of the rhyme-scheme is deliberately departed from. Both rhythmically and phonetically the verse thus mimes the nervous, unpredictable movement of the fox as it delicately steps forward, then stops suddenly to check the terrain before it runs on only to stop again. The tracks which the fox leaves in the snow are themselves duplicated by the sounds and rhythm of the line ‘Sets neat prints into the snow’. The first three short words of this line are internal half-rhymes, as neat, as identical and as sharply outlined as the fox’s paw-marks, and these words press down gently but distinctly into the soft open vowel of ‘snow’. The fox’s body remains indistinct, a silhouette against the snow. But the phrase ‘lame shadow’ itself evokes a more precise image of the fox, as it freezes alertly in its tracks, holding one front-paw in mid-air, and then moves off again like a limping animal. At the end of the stanza the words ‘bold to come’ are left suspended – as though the fox is pausing at the outer edge of some trees. The gap between the stanzas is itself the clearing which the fox, after hesitating warily, suddenly shoots across: ‘Of a body that is bold to come / Across clearings. ..’
 

At this point in the poem the hesitant rhythm of that single sentence which is prolonged over five stanzas breaks into a final and deliberate run. The fox has scented safety. After its dash across the clearing of the stanza-break, it has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet and upon the reader:
 

                                       an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business. ..

It is so close now that its two eyes have merged into a single green glare which grows wider and wider as the fox comes nearer, its eyes heading directly towards ours: ‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head’. If we follow the ‘visual logic’ of the poem we are compelled to imagine the fox actually jumping through the eyes of the poet – with whom the reader of the poem is inevitably drawn into identification. The fox enters the lair of the head as it would enter its own lair, bringing with it the hot, sensual, animal reek of its body and all the excitement and power of the achieved vision.

The fox is no longer a formless stirring somewhere in the dark depths of the bodily imagination; it has been coaxed out of the darkness and into full consciousness. It is no longer nervous and vulnerable, but at home in the lair of the head, safe from extinction, perfectly created, its being caught for ever on the page. And all this has been done purely by the imagination. For in reality there is no fox at all, and outside, in the external darkness, nothing has changed: ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.’ The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox. ‘And I suppose,’ Ted Hughes has written, ‘that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them.’[1]

After discussing ‘The thought-fox’ in his book The Art of Ted Hughes, Keith Sagar writes: ‘Suddenly, out of the unknown, there it is, with all the characteristics of a living thing – “a sudden sharp hot stink of fox”. A simple trick like pulling a kicking rabbit from a hat, but only a true poet can do it’.[2] In this particular instance it seems to me that the simile Sagar uses betrays him into an inappropriate critical response His comparison may be apt in one respect, for it is certainly true that there is a powerful element of magic in the poem. But this magic has little to do with party-conjurors who pull rabbits out of top-hats. It is more like the sublime and awesome magic which is contained in the myth of creation, where God creates living beings out of nothingness by the mere fiat of his imagination.
 

The very sublimity and God-like nature of Hughes’s vision can engender uneasiness. For Hughes’s fox has none of the freedom of an animal. It cannot get up from the page and walk off to nuzzle its young cubs or do foxy things behind the poet’s back. It cannot even die in its own mortal, animal way. For it is the poet’s creature, wholly owned and possessed by him, fashioned almost egotistically in order to proclaim not its own reality but that of its imaginatively omnipotent creator. (I originally wrote these words before coming across Hughes’s own discussion of the poem in Poetry in the Making: ‘So, you see, in some ways my fox is better than an ordinary fox. It will live for ever, it will never suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go. And I made it. And all through imagining it clearly enough and finding the living  words’ (p. 21).)
 

This feeling of uneasiness is heightened by the last stanza of the poem. For although this stanza clearly communicates the excitement of poetic creation, it seems at the same time to express an almost predatory thrill; it is as though the fox has successfully been lured into a hunter’s trap. The bleak matter-of-factness of the final line – ’The page is printed’ – only reinforces the curious deadness of the thought-fox. If, at the end of the poem, there is one sense in which the fox is vividly and immediately alive, it is only because it has been pinned so artfully upon the page. The very accuracy of the evocation of the fox seems at times almost fussily obsessive. The studied and beautifully ‘final’ nature of the poem indicates that we are not in the presence of any untrained spontaneity, any primitive or naive vision. It might be suggested that the sensibility behind Hughes’s poem is more that of an intellectual – an intellectual who, in rebellion against his own ascetic rationalism, feels himself driven to hunt down and capture an element of his own sensual and intuitive identity which he does not securely possess.

In this respect Hughes’s vision is perhaps most nearly akin to that of D. H. Lawrence, who was also an intellectual in rebellion against his own rationalism, a puritan who never ceased to quarrel with his own puritanism. But Lawrence’s animal poems, as some critics have observed, are very different from those of Hughes. Lawrence has a much greater respect for the integrity and independence of the animals he writes about. In ‘Snake’ he expresses remorse for the rationalistic, ‘educated’ violence which he inflicts on the animal. And at the end of the poem he is able, as it were, retrospectively to allow his dark sexual, sensual, animal alter ego to crawl off into the bowels of the earth, there to reign alone and supreme in a kingdom where Lawrence recognises he can have no part. Hughes, in ‘The thought-fox’ at least, cannot do this. It would seem that, possessing his own sensual identity even less securely than Lawrence, he needs the ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’ to pump up the attenuated sense he has of the reality of his own body and his own feelings. And so he pins the fox upon the page with the cruel purity of artistic form and locates its lair inside his own head. And the fox lives triumphantly as an idea – as a part of the poet’s own identity – but dies as a fox.

If there is a difference between ‘The thought-fox’ and the animal poems of Lawrence there is also, of course, a difference between Hughes’s poetic vision and that kind of extreme scientific rationalism which both Lawrence and Hughes attack throughout their work. For in the mind of the orthodox rationalist the fox is dead even as an idea. So it is doubly dead and the orthodox rationalist, who is always a secret puritan, is more than happy about this. For he doesn’t want the hot sensual reek of fox clinging to his pure rational spirit, reminding him that he once possessed such an obscene thing as a body.

This difference may appear absolute. But it seems to me that it would be wrong to regard it as such, and that there is a much closer relationship between the sensibility which is expressed in Hughes’s poem and the sensibility of ‘puritanical rationalism’ than would generally be acknowledged. The orthodox rationalist, it might be said, inflicts the violence of reason on animal sensuality in an obsessive attempt to eliminate it entirely. Hughes in ‘The thought-fox’ unconsciously inflicts the violence of an art upon animal sensuality in a passionate but conflict-ridden attempt to incorporate it into his own rationalist identity.
 

The conflict of sensibility which Hughes unconsciously dramatises in ‘The thought-fox’ runs through all his poetry. On the one hand there is in his work an extraordinary sensuous and sensual generosity which coexists with a sense of abundance and a capacity for expressing tenderness which are unusual in contemporary poetry .These qualities are particularly in evidence in some of the most mysteriously powerful of all his poems – poems such as ‘Crow’s undersong’, ‘Littleblood’, ‘Full moon and little Frieda’ and ‘Bride and groom lie hidden for three days’ .On the other hand his poetry – and above all his poetry in Crow – is notorious for the raging intensity of its violence, a violence which, by some critics at least, has been seen as destructive of all artistic and human values. Hughes himself seems consistently to see his own poetic sensitivity as ‘feminine’ and his poetry frequently gives the impression that he can allow himself to indulge this sensitivity only within a protective shell of hard, steely ‘masculine’ violence.

In ‘The thought-fox’ itself this conflict of sensibility appears in such an attenuated or suppressed form that it is by no means the most striking feature of the poem. But, as I have tried to show, the conflict may still be discerned. It is present above all in the tension between the extraordinary sensuous delicacy of the image which Hughes uses to describe the fox’s nose and the predatory, impulse which seems to underlie the poem – an impulse to which Hughes has himself drawn attention by repeatedly comparing the act of poetic creation to the process of capturing or killing small animals.[3] Indeed it might be suggested that the last stanza of the poem records what is, in effect, a ritual of tough ‘manly’ posturing. For in it the poet might be seen as playing a kind of imaginative game in which he attempts to outstare the fox – looking straight into its eyes as it comes closer and closer and refusing to move, refusing to flinch, refusing to show any sign of ‘feminine’ weakness. The fox itself does not flinch or deviate from its course. It is almost as though, in doing this, it has successfully come through an initiation-ritual to which the poet has unconsciously submitted it; the fox which is initially nervous, circumspect, and as soft and delicate as the dark snow, has proved that it is not ‘feminine’ after all but tough, manly and steely willed ‘brilliantly, concentratedly, coming about its own business’.  It is on these conditions alone, perhaps, that its sensuality can be accepted by the poet without anxiety.

Whether or not the last tentative part of my analysis is accepted, it will perhaps be allowed that the underlying pattern of the poem is one of sensitivity-within- toughness; it is one in which a sensuality or sensuousness which might sometimes be characterised as ‘feminine’ can be incorporated into the identity only to the extent that it has been purified by, or subordinated to, a tough, rational, artistic will.

The same conflict of sensibility which is unconsciously dramatised in ‘The thought-fox’ also appears, in an implicit form, in one of the finest and most powerful poems in Lupercal, ‘Snowdrop’:
 

Now is the globe shrunk tight

Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness Not in their right minds,

With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

The poem begins by evoking, from the still and tiny perspective of the hibernating mouse, a vast intimacy with the tightening body of the earth. But the numbness of ‘wintering heart’ undermines the emotional security which might be conveyed by the initial image. The next lines introduce a harsh predatory derangement into nature through which two conventionally threatening animals, the weasel and the crow, move ‘as if moulded in brass’ .It is only at this point, after a sense of petrified and frozen vitality has been established, that the snowdrop is, as it were, ‘noticed’ by the poem. What might be described as a conventional and sentimental personification of the snowdrop is actually intensified by the fact that ‘she’ can be identified only from the title. This lends to the pronoun a mysterious power through which the poem gestures towards an affirmation of ‘feminine’ frailty and its ability to survive even the cruel rigour of winter. But before this gesture can even be completed it is overlaid by an evocation of violent striving:
 

She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

The last line is finely balanced between the fragility of ‘pale’ and the steeliness of ‘metal’ – a word whose sound softens and moderates its sense .The line serves to evoke a precise visual image of the snowdrop, the relative heaviness of whose flower cannot be entirely supported by its frail stem. But at the same time the phrase ‘her pale head’ minimally continues the personification which is first established by the pronoun ‘she’. In this way the feminine snowdrop – a little incarnation, almost, of the White Goddess – is located within that world of frozen and sleeping vitality which is created by the poem, a vitality which can only be preserved, it would seem, if it is encased within a hard, metallic, evolutionary will.
 

The beauty of this poem resides precisely in the way that a complex emotional ambivalence is reflected through language. But if we can withdraw ourselves from the influence of the spell which the poem undoubtedly casts, the vision of the snowdrop cannot but seem an alien one. What seems strange about the poem is the lack of any recognition that the snowdrop survives not because of any hidden reserves of massive evolutionary strength or will, but precisely because of its frailty – its evolutionary vitality is owed directly to the very delicacy, softness and flexibility of its structure. In Hughes’s poem the purposeless and consciousless snowdrop comes very near to being a little Schopenhauer philosophising in the rose-garden, a little Stalin striving to disguise an unmanly and maidenly blush behind a hard coat of assumed steel. We might well be reminded of Hughes’s own account of the intentions which lay behind his poem ‘Hawk roosting’. ‘Actually what I had in mind’, Hughes has said, ‘was that in this hawk Nature is thinking … I intended some creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine.’ But, as Hughes himself is obliged to confess, ‘He doesn’t sound like Isis, mother of the gods, which he is. He sounds like Hitler’s familiar spirit.’ In an attempt to account for the gap between intention and performance Hughes invokes cultural history: ‘When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature. ..and nature became the devil.’[4] This piece of rationalisation, however, seems all too like an attempt to externalise a conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. The conflict in question is the same as that which may be divined both in ‘The thought-fox’ and in ‘Snowdrop’ , in which a frail sensuousness which might be characterised as , ‘feminine’ can be accepted only after it has been subordinated to a tough and rational will.
 

The conflict between violence and tenderness which is present in an oblique form throughout Hughes’ early poetry is one that is in no sense healed or resolved in his later work. Indeed it might be suggested that much of the poetic and emotional charge of this later work comes directly from an intensification of this conflict and an increasingly explicit polarisation of its terms. The repressed tenderness of ‘Snowdrop’ or the tough steely sensibility which is expressed in ‘Thrushes’, with its idealisation of the ‘bullet and automatic / Purpose’ of instinctual life, is seemingly very different to the all but unprotected sensuous delicacy of ‘Littleblood’, the poem with which Hughes ends Crow:

O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase

Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
. . . .
Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.

But this poem must ultimately be located within the larger context which is provided by the Crow poems. This context is one of a massive unleashing of sadistic violence -a violence which is never endorsed by Hughes but which, nevertheless, seems to provide a kind of necessary psychological armour within which alone tenderness can be liberated without anxiety.
 

In pointing to the role which is played by a particular conflict of sensibility in Hughes’s poetry I am not in any way seeking to undermine the case which can – and should – be made for what would conventionally be called Hughes’s poetic ‘greatness’. Indeed, my intention is almost the reverse of this. For it seems to me that one of the factors which moderates or diminishes the imaginative power of some of Hughes’s early poetry is precisely the way in which an acute conflict which is central to his own poetic sensibility tends to be disguised or, suppressed. In Crow, which I take to be Hughes’s most extraordinary poetic achievement to date, Hughes, almost for the first time, assumes imaginative responsibility for the puritanical violence which is present in his poetry from the very beginnings. In doing so he seems to take full possession of his own poetic powers. It is as though a conflict which had, until that point, led a shadowy and underworld existence, is suddenly cracked open in order to disgorge not only its own violence but also all that imaginative wealth and vitality which had been half locked up within it.
 

The most obvious precedent for such a violent eruption of imaginative powers is that which is provided by Shakespeare, and perhaps above all by King Lear. Lear is a play of extraordinary violence whose persistent image, as Caroline Spurgeon has observed, is that ‘of a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack’.[5] But at the same time it is a play about a man who struggles to repossess his own tenderness and emotional vitality and to weep those tears which, at the beginning of the play, he contemptuously dismisses as soft, weak and womanly. The same conflict reappears throughout Shakespeare’s poetry. We have only to recall Lady Macbeth’s renunciation of her own ‘soft’ maternal impulses in order to appreciate the fluency of Shakespeare’s own imaginative access to this conflict and the disturbing cruelty of its terms:
 

                                              I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this. (I. vii)

The intense conflict between violence and tenderness which is expressed in these lines is, of course, in no sense one which will be found only in the poetic vision of Hughes and Shakespeare. It is present in poetry from the Old Testament onwards and indeed it might reasonably be regarded as a universal conflict, within which are contained and expressed some of the most fundamental characteristics of the human identity.

Any full investigation of the conflict and of its cultural significance would inevitably need to take account both of what Mark Spilka has called ‘Lawrence’s quarrel with tenderness’ and of Ian Suttie’s discussion of the extent and rigour of the ‘taboo on tenderness’ in our own culture.[6] But such an investigation would also need to take into consideration a much larger cultural context, and perhaps above all to examine the way in which the Christian ideal of love has itself traditionally been expressed within the medium of violent apocalyptic fantasies.

The investigation which I describe is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. My more modest aim here has been to draw attention to the role which is played by this conflict in two of the most hauntingly powerful of Ted Hughes’s early poems and to suggest that Hughes’s poetic powers are fully realised not when this conflict is resolved but when it is unleashed in its most violent form.
 

In taking this approach I am motivated in part by the feeling that the discussion of Hughes’s poetry has sometimes been too much in thrall to a powerful cultural image of Hughes’s poetic personality – one which he himself has tended to project. In this image Hughes is above all an isolated and embattled figure who has set himself against the entire course both of modern poetry and of modern history .He is rather like the hero in one of his most powerful poems ‘Stealing trout on a May morning’, resolutely and stubbornly wading upstream, his feet rooted in the primeval strength of the river’s bed as the whole course of modern history and modern puritanical rationalism floods violently past him in the opposite direction, bearing with it what Hughes himself has called ‘mental disintegration … under the super-ego of Moses … and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’, and leaving him in secure possession of that ancient and archaic imaginative energy which he invokes in his poetry.

The alternative to this Romantic view of Hughes’s poetic personality is to see Hughes’s poetry as essentially the poetry of an intellectual, an intellectual who is subject to the rigours of ‘puritanical rationalism’ just as much as any other intellectual but who, instead of submitting to those rigours, fights against them with that stubborn and intransigent resolution which belongs only to the puritan soul.

In reality perhaps neither of these views is wholly appropriate, and the truth comes somewhere between the two. But what does seem clear is that when Hughes talks of modern civilisation as consisting in ‘mental disintegration. ..under the super-ego of Moses … and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’ he is once again engaging in that characteristic strategy of externalising a conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. For it must be suggested that Paul’s own ‘schizophrenia’ consisted in an acute conflict between the impulse towards tenderness, abundance and generosity and the impulse towards puritanical violence – the violence of chastity. It is precisely this conflict which seems to be buried in Hughes’s early poetry and which, as I have suggested, eventually erupts in the poetry of Crow. If, in Crow, Hughes is able to explore and express the internalised violence of the rationalist sensibility with more imaginative power than any other modern poet, it is perhaps because he does so from within a poetic sensibility which is itself profoundly intellectual, and deeply marked by that very puritanical rationalism which he so frequently – and I believe justifiably – attacks.

 

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Analysis of "The Thought-Fox"

I have chosen to analyze the poem "The Thought-Fox" by Ted Hughes. It first grabbed my attention when I saw the title, "The Thought-Fox." I though that it looked like it would be an interesting poem. Of all of Ted Hughes’ animal poems, I choose this one because I think foxes are pretty neat animals, not to mention my name is Scottish for fox. When I read it, I thought it was a good interesting poem about a fox chasing his prey through the forest. After I started to read it some more it started to be evident that things were different than they had first appeared. I began to get more and more out of the poem. I decided to analyze this poem because it contains so much, even though the poem itself is only twenty-four lines long. There is a poet that cannot think of anything to write until he imagines a fox in the forest. The way the fox leaps into the writer’s head shows the animal ferocity that Hughes writes with. His muse is the fox and his writing style is just like a fox, graceful, nimble, and yet very aggressive. Every line that Hughes writes means so much and every little detail that he writes adds immensely to the poem. Hughes had a real kinship with nature that helped him write this great poem.
As I was looking over this poem, I thought it might be a good idea to have some background information on Ted Hughes. Maybe Hughes had a run-in with a fox once, or maybe he had a dream about one. Though I never found out if Hughes had a dream about a fox, I did find out something interesting. I found out that when he was a kid, Hughes moved from Mytholmroyd to Mexborough, a small town outside of York. Ted found out that there was not much to do there. When Ted was around the age of eight years old he used to retreat "to a nearby estate on his own, often stalking animals as he did back in Mytholmroyd" on the weekends (Kazzer 2). This is probably why he had such a fascination with animals and why he enjoyed writing about them so much. He had most likely encountered a fox or two then, though I could not find any specific examples. In 1954 he was also a zoo attendant for a while, which, most likely, gave him a greater understanding of animals (Kazzer 3). It seems to me that Hughes was in tune with nature, especially animals. As a kid, Hughes also read and reread Shakespeare, mainly because there was nothing else to do (Kazzer 2). Later in life, Hughes became Poet Laureate, one of the highest honors a poet, in England, can receive. With the background knowledge that Hughes had much contact with animals, I began to look over the poem again.
The first thing one sees when they look at the poem is the title, in this case "The Thought-Fox." Usually the title tells what the poem is about. This particular title, "The Thought-Fox," indicates that the poem is about a fox or an imaginary fox. Why an imaginary fox, though, and not a real one? Perhaps it is a real fox that just thinks a lot. Perhaps it suggests that someone thinks like a fox. I know that a fox is a wily, very smart creature. Even though it is small it can be ferocious and very quick. If it is just a man thinking about a fox then perhaps he wants to have these characteristics. To figure out exactly what the title meant I had to look at the poem.
The first stanza gives the setting to this poem. It is a person sitting down trying to think of something to write. He is looking around, letting his mind wander. The author wants to create something, but he does not know what it is he wants to create. The first line indicates that he is imagining a forest at night. It also tells us that the author is up late trying to think of something to write. The author wants something to fill his empty world; he wants something living to enter his forest. He has this blank sheet of paper in front of him; he only needs an idea to spark some creativity. Even the clock itself seems lonely. It as if time has stopped, but "something else is alive" (Hughes 2). What else is alive? I do not think that the author knows exactly what it is at this point. I think that his forest is his paper though, and this "something" is what he is going to write down on paper, perhaps in the form of a poem. He is ready to write and very anxious to do so. His fingers are moving over the page as if he wants to start, but cannot for some reason. It looks to me as if the writer in this poem has a simple case of writers’ block.
The next stanza begins with "Through the window I see no star" (Hughes 5). It is almost as if nothing from the outside world can get in. Hughes looks outside for something to spark an idea, a star, anything, and yet he sees nothing that can help him. The author cannot find anything to inspire him. "Something more near/ Though deeper within darkness/ Is entering the loneliness," are the next three lines of the second stanza (Hughes 6-8). It is if something is trying to get inside, not inside his house, but rather inside the loneliness of his head. An idea is starting to creep in past the darkness. It seems as if this something is already shrouded in a darkness of its own, one even deeper than the writer’s. This creature of idea is entering the loneliness of the writer’s head. This idea seems to be something that is close to him, perhaps a pet or animal that he has recently seen. In Ted Hughes case perhaps it is an animal from his childhood memories. It could be an animal that he used to stalk as a kid, or even an animal he pretended he was when he was stalking.
Now enter the ever-wily fox. If ever there was a creature that could sneak past anything without being noticed it would be the fox. Hughes compares the fox moving around to snowflakes, some of the most delicate things in the world. The poet is starting off delicately just as a fox would when he has spotted his prey. This fox is making its way into the poet’s head, where no other idea can get into. The fox sniffs his way around to help him find his quarry. Meanwhile, the fox’s eyes tell it where to go. "Two eyes serve a movement, that now/ And again now, and now, and now/ Sets neat prints into the snow" (Hughes 11-13). These lines while showing the gracefulness, yet animal prowess of the fox has a different meaning to me. When I look at these lines I cannot help thinking of Hughes writing this poem. When I look at his graceful and beautiful words on the stark white paper in front of me, I cannot help thinking of these lines. His words are just like the fox. They are graceful, yet imbued with a ferocious animal power that captivates your attention. The prints’ of the fox in the snow are the print on the white paper. Just as the fox sniffs out his prey and starts to track it, the poet gets an idea and starts to write it down.
As I continue through the fourth stanza of this poem I still have to reason in the same way. When the author describes the neat prints in the snow between the trees, I think of the lines on paper. I imagine all of these huge trees that are all perfectly straight. Now I have this image of these beautiful, creative words in nice straight lines on a sheet of paper. The poet is finally beginning to write something down on his blank piece of paper. In other words he is populating his forest. The next words, "and warily a lame/ Shadow lags by stump and in hollow/ Of a body that is bold to come," remind me of a pencil being used to write a poem or essay on paper (Hughes 14-16). The gray or black shadow that is left behind the fox as he moves seems so much like that the gray lead that a pencil, or the black ink of a pen, leaves as it would move so gracefully along the paper, while Hughes wrote this poem. It is as if each letter is part of the fox’s trail. It is weaving up, down, around, through, and in between the trees, or lines, in search of the end. Though the author begins warily, just as the fox does, he does seem to have started his work and have an idea in his head.
The next stanza is more of the same. Now the writer is imbued with the spirit of the fox; he is the fox. He is writing feverishly and, yet, he is concentrating. He has to be careful as not to mess this up. He cannot afford any mistakes in what he is doing. He is writing the body of his work across the clearings, or the spaces in between the stanzas. We see the image of the eye again in this stanza. I think that the eye is a symbol of the poet being cautious. The writer is looking where he is going. It could also mean that the writer is looking for what to write about next. I think that the author is just putting down what he sees next, while not really thinking about it. It is just as if the writing of this poem is by animal instinct. He seems to know what to write down without even having to think about it. "A widening deepening greenness" reminds me of grass growing and becoming healthier (Hughes 18). Just as the grass is growing and becoming greener, so is the author’s imagination; his work is growing. He is coming along just fine about his business when we read the last stanza.
Then in the last stanza it happens. "Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox/ It enters the dark hole of the head" (Hughes 21-22). The author has his muse that he so much needed at the beginning of this poem. These lines of the poem are great. The fox has been quietly and ever so delicately sneaking up, and now when it is so close it springs forth with its mighty attack. You have this stinky beast that finds his way into this author’s mind. The author has been writing with the same ferocity and animal instinct that the fox itself has. The fox has jumped into the hole, trapped his prey, and reached the finish. As suddenly as the fox’s stench appeared the writer has finished his masterpiece. The fox has taken over, or, as I said before, the author has become the fox. "The window is starless still; the clock ticks,/ The page is printed" (Hughes 23-24). These last lines are very interesting. It seems as if nothing can get through even yet, but it is for a different reason this time. Now the author is so focused with his work that he does not even notice anything else. Now the clock is ticking and a new era has begun for the author. He has his muse, the fox, and he has finished his work.
Though outwardly the poem, "The Thought-Fox," is about a writer thinking of meeting a fox in a forest at midnight, it has a much deeper meaning. This author has writers’ block and has no clue as what to write about. An idea starts to creep into his head and before he knows it he is imbued with this animal-like passion that he uses in his writing. This could very well be a poem in which Ted Hughes writes about himself. The author needed a muse and he has finally found it. The "sudden sharp hot stink of fox" has entered his head and it is not about to leave (Hughes 21). Even the rhythm of this poem is somewhat like the fox running through the forest. The rhythm is elegant and yet it hops around, changing ever so slightly from stanza to stanza. There is no set length to the lines and even the rhyming scheme changes from stanza to stanza. This is just like the fox running in a straight line, then bolting to the side changing its path.
The reason why I think that this fox is Hughes’ muse is because of his close connection with animals, especially when he was a kid. Hughes wrote many poems on animals and, in a quote of George Macbeth’s, "Hughes has said that this was the first animal poem he wrote" (Thomas and DeMello 98). After this poem Hughes wrote many more on or about animals. He wrote them with the same animal passion that he wrote this poem with. Now the title tends to make more sense also. "The Thought-Fox" is the imaginary fox that becomes the poet’s inspiration. Hughes has a sort of kinship with nature, and it shows in this poem. From his imagery of the forest scene and the fox, one can tell that Hughes is in his element talking about nature. Perhaps being the fox is not just a new thought to him though. When he was a kid stalking animals he could have pretended that he was a fox.
"The Thought-Fox" by Ted Hughes is a wonderfully well-written poem. I love the idea of a poem about a poet struggling to write a poem. The language that Ted Hughes uses in this poem is great and it definitely grabbed my attention when I read it. The way that Hughes set about writing this poem is fantastic. It is graceful, reads swiftly, and yet it has this raw animal power that makes one so enthralled with it. And just like the fox it begins slowly and cautiously, but near the end it attacks with one swift blow. This poem, though while somewhat straightforward, has much more to it than meets the eye. Even though we know that there is a writer, it is harder to see that the fox is actually his spirit, in a sense, and not just an idea for a poem. From the fox being his pen and pencil to the forest being his paper, this poem is full of hidden images. Every line has such a profound meaning and most of them have more than one. Hughes seems to be more in touch with nature than most of the other nature poets that I have read. He has all of the characteristics of the fox he writes about in this poem. This is why I love this poem so much, and one reason why I chose to analyze it.

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1.-INTRODUCTION:

In this four and last individual paper I am going to analyse the figure of Ted Hughes (1930-1998) who was an eminent English poet who led a resurgence of English poetic innovation starting in the late 1950s. Then Hughes became especially known for his graphic depiction of struggle and conflict. And later, in 1985, he was named poet laureate.[1][1]

Hughes' poetry established his pre-eminence in English poetry at an early stage and indicated a resurgence of English poetic innovation after a long period of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish dominance.

Many of his early poems especially shared a more general post-modernist concern with struggle and the violent affirmation of identity, and some more traditionally-minded critics have seen them as rather alien to the English spirit of harmony and compromise. [2][2]

I have focussed my attention in one of his poems called “Thought-Fox” principally because Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals.

2.-ANALYSIS:

The ‘Thought-Fox’ has often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realised and artistically satisfying of the poems in Ted Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain

THE THOUGHT-FOX[3][3]

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near

Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.
.

I will become saying that ‘The thought-fox’ is a poem about writing a poem. Its external action takes place in a room late at night where the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is starless, silent, and totally black. But the poet senses a presence which disturbs him:

In the two first paragraphs we can observe how the author is describing the environment, a forest in the midnight; he also has in front of him a blank page where his fingers move, and as he says Through the window I see no star. But inside that completely darkness we can find the loneliness.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near

Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness.

The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night, for the night is itself a metaphor for the deeper and more intimate darkness of the poet’s imagination in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines; it is not seen but felt – frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet’s task is to coax it out of formlessness and into fuller consciousness by the sensitivity of his language. The remote stirrings of the poem are compared to the stirrings of an animal – a fox, whose body is invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously through the dark undergrowth: [4][4]

But in the middle of that darkness the author finds something that corrupts his loneliness, it is a fox. (Verses 9 and 10)

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

The idea of the delicate dark snow evokes the physical reality of the fox’s nose which is itself cold, dark and damp, twitching moistly and gently against twig and leaf. In this way the first feature of the fox is mysteriously defined and its wet black nose is nervously alive in the darkness.

Gradually the fox’s eyes appear out of the same formlessness, leading the shadowy movement of its body as it comes closer:  (Verses 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15) 4

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow.

The tracks which the fox leaves in the snow are themselves duplicated by the sounds and rhythm of the line ‘Sets neat prints into the snow’. (Verse 13)

The first three short words of this line are internal half-rhymes, and these words press down gently but distinctly into the soft open vowel of ‘snow’. The fox’s body remains indistinct, a silhouette against the snow. But the phrase ‘lame shadow’ itself evokes a more precise image of the fox, as it freezes alertly in its tracks, holding one front-paw in mid-air, and then moves off again like a limping animal. At the end of the stanza the words ‘bold to come’ (Verse 16) are left suspended – as though the fox is pausing at the outer edge of some trees. The gap between the stanzas is itself the clearing which the fox, after hesitating warily, suddenly shoots across: ‘Of a body that is bold to come / Across clearings.’ (Verses 16 and 17) 4

 

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The fox has scented safety. It has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet (and upon the reader). In this part of the poem we can see what colour its eyes are: (Verses 17, 18, 19 and 20)

an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business. ..

It is so close now that its two eyes have merged into a single green glare which grows wider and wider as the fox comes nearer, its eyes heading directly towards ours: ‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head’. (Verses 21 and 22) 4

If we are following the full poem the ‘visual logic’ of the poem makes us to imagine the fox actually jumping through the eyes of the poet – with whom us (the readers of the poem) is inevitably drawn into identification.

That means that the fox enters the lair of the head as it would enter its own lair, bringing with it the hot, sensual, animal reek of its body and all the excitement and power of the achieved vision.

The fox is no longer a formless stirring somewhere in the dark depths of the bodily imagination; it has been coaxed out of the darkness and into full consciousness. And all this has been done purely by the imagination. For in reality there is no fox at all, and outside, in the external darkness, nothing has changed: ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.’ (Verses 23 and 24) 4

The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox.

For Hughes’s fox has none of the freedom of an animal. It cannot get up from the page and walk off to nuzzle its young cubs or do foxy things behind the poet’s back. It cannot even die in its own mortal, animal way.

Hughes in ‘The thought-fox’ unconsciously inflicts the violence of an art upon animal sensuality in a passionate but conflict-ridden attempt to incorporate it into his own rationalist identity. 4

The very accuracy of the evocation of the fox seems at times almost fussily obsessive. The studied and beautifully ‘final’ nature of the poem indicates that we are not in the presence of any untrained spontaneity, any primitive or naive vision. It might be suggested that the sensibility behind Hughes’s poem is more that of an intellectual – an intellectual who, in rebellion against his own ascetic rationalism, feels himself driven to hunt down and capture an element of his own sensual and intuitive identity which he does not securely possess. 4

The conflict of sensibility which Hughes unconsciously dramatises in ‘The thought-fox’ runs through all his poetry. On the one hand there is in his work an extraordinary sensuous and sensual generosity which coexists with a sense of abundance and a capacity for expressing tenderness which are unusual in contemporary poetry. 4

In ‘The thought-fox’ itself this conflict of sensibility appears in such an attenuated or suppressed form that it is by no means the most striking feature of the poem. But, as I have tried to show, the conflict may still be discerned. It is present above all in the tension between the extraordinary sensuous delicacy of the image which Hughes uses to describe the fox’s nose and the predatory, impulse which seems to underlie the poem – an impulse to which Hughes has himself drawn attention by repeatedly comparing the act of poetic creation to the process of capturing or killing small animals.  Indeed it might be suggested that the last stanza of the poem records what is, in effect, a ritual of tough ‘manly’ posturing. For in it the poet might be seen as playing a kind of imaginative game in which he attempts to outstare the fox – looking straight into its eyes as it comes closer and closer and refusing to move, refusing to flinch, refusing to show any sign of ‘feminine’ weakness. The fox itself does not flinch or deviate from its course. 4

Now I am going to do an analysis of the rhythm, sonnets and the stanzas.

Their rhyme’s structure followed is A / A / B / B in the first stanza but in the second stanza it changes to C / C / D / D.

Talking about the verb tense I can say that the author uses the present tense because it is a recent event. And the metaphors are clearly noticeable during the poem because, if I have understand correctly the poem, the poem is itself a metaphor. The fox is all the poem itself.

In the first two lines of this passage the rhythm of the verse is broken by the punctuation and the line-endings, while at the same time what seemed the predictable course of the rhyme-scheme is deliberately departed from. Both rhythmically and phonetically the verse thus mimes the nervous, unpredictable movement of the fox as it delicately steps forward.

Arriving to the fifth stanza of the poem the hesitant rhythm of that single sentence which is prolonged over five stanzas breaks into a final and deliberate run.

As I see the last stanza of the poem clearly communicates the excitement of poetic creation, it seems at the same time to express an almost predatory thrill; it is as though the fox has successfully been lured into a hunter’s trap.

To sum up the main characteristics of Hughes poetry I want to show and compare him with one of the first periods that I have study this year. This is that there is an alternative to the Romantic view of Hughes’s poetic personality. That is to see Hughes’s poetry as essentially the poetry of an intellectual, an intellectual who is subject to the rigours of ‘puritanical rationalism’ just as much as any other intellectual but who, instead of submitting to those rigours, fights against them with that stubborn and intransigent resolution which belongs only to the puritan soul.

But Hughes is always talking of modern civilisation as consisting in ‘mental disintegration’.

And for that reason I want to show something that Ted Hughes has written, ‘that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them’. [5][5]

3.-CONCLUSION:

In this essay I have set out to use what might be regarded as a very ordinary analysis of a poem in order to focus attention on some aspects of Hughes’s poetry. My particular interest is Hughes’s poetic vision.

Finally I have to say that Hughes’s vision have opened in me like a window through which I could know that poetry is always there but we do not know how many things a poem can give to us every time that we read it. Because it depends on the moment we read a poem, where we read a poem, or even if we know the environmental in which a poem was written we can improve ourselves by different ways.

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Ted Hughes said"that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them.The poem appeared in Ted Hughes's first collection The Hawk in the Rain.It is the most frequently anthologised of Hughes' poems.
The midnight is chosen at the time as it is without any addition to the day, as blank as the poet's mind itself. The time is unmarked and yet mature. The clock is alone as it is devoid of minutes and seconds, it being midnight. Further, the clock is alive as it is lonely. And there is something else that accompanies the loneliness of the clock-that is the poet's creative consciousness. The metaphor for the poet's fresh poetic perception is the "blank paper" where his fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness.
Note that the poet cannot observe any star but can comprehend something that holds more promise for him. He cannot apprehend it through the senses but experience it through instinct..The image is first formless and can only be a professed feeling formless as the poetic vision of the poet itself, until it assumes concreteshape. It does not enter in a strained and enforced manner but as delicately as snow falls in. The fox's nose touches deftly against the twig, leaf. The nose feels its way through the darkness. At once the fox transforms itself to the concrete and persistent image of the poet's creative working progress. By utilizing an animal as the reflection for his thought process ,one wonders whether Ted Hughes writes primarily through instinct.
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
These eyes look to the readers like both the fox's eyes and also the poet's' studied' eye movements. The fox goes on to set neat prints' on the snow, the writing comes across coherently and clearly on the paper. The soft snow brushing against the trees falls in dark flakes to the ground, as the words on the blank paper, and in a lovely manner fall into place. The words:" now/And again now, and now, and now "point to the continuity that has been picked up by the poet. The continuity is accompanied by "punctuation'-therefore it is a staggering continuity; the idea being reinforced by the word 'lame'. The predictable rhyme scheme is also departed from, reflecting urgency on the part of the poet and the fox to reach their destination disregarding rhythm for the time being. The movement of the lines voice the movement of the fox. Alliteration is utilized to mime coherence. Though at first, the fox is agile, it staggers occasionally
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
At times, it appears like" a lame shadow' endeavoring to pick up speed and accelerate towards the final goal. The term stump' refers to the base of the tree that is incomplete without the tree-top. The stump' at once functions as a invasive metaphor for the writer's block. The poet has to make his creativity go beyond the stump' and not leave his poetic capabilities stunted'. It' is in the hollow of a body that is "bold to come", yet to flourish and blossom.
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Across the clearings and the undergrowth, there is indeed "an eye". The "eye" standing for insight here. This insight is coupled with a widening and deepening "greenness",. The greenness symbolizing fertility and creation at once. Its business is that of its own, not one of after-thought, but that of impulse.
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
.The poet thought process is filled with hot stink" of the fox, the heat of its passion. The thought-process is saturated now, and hence hot and humid. As the poem comes into place, the window is starless still. The poet at had first set eyes outside the window, for inspiration. Nevertheless, towards the end of the poem he comes to recognize that inspiration comes from within,and not outside. The window is starless still, yet-"the page is printed" Intuition reigns over inspiration here, and instinct over reason.

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