Page 65 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Elective English–II

Notes 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. ..’

Notes ‘It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will
unlock the doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something—
perhaps not much, just something—of the crush of information that presses in on
us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a
street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express
something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are.’

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:

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