Page 64 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Unit 5: The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes

Cold, delicately as the dark snow, Notes

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;

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 59