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Unit 5: The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes

an eye, Notes

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 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, everytime anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of
the darkness and come walking towards them.’
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’. 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’).
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

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