Page 68 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Unit 5: The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes

attention by repeatedly comparing the act of poetic creation to the process of capturing or Notes
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.
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

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