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Elective English–II

Notes 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 consistent 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

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