Page 73 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Elective English–II

Notes happens in the poem, The Thought-Fox. This critic regards The Thought-Fox as the finest of
the five animal poems in the volume entitled “The Hawk in the Rain”. Talking about his
childhood passion for capturing animals, Hughes has described the composition of this poem
in the following manner:
An animal I never succeeded in keeping alive is the fox. I was always frustrated: twice by a
farmer, who killed cubs I had caught before I could get to them, and once by a poultry-keeper
who freed my cub while his dog waited. Years after those events I was sitting up late one
snowy night in dreary lodgings in London. I had written nothing for a year or so but that
night I got the idea I might write something, and I wrote in a few minutes The Thought Fox;
the first animal poem I ever wrote.
The same critic goes on to say that, although The Thought Fox is a fox of imagination, it has
been presented in the poem with a beautifully solid foxy reality. Continuing his comment, this
critic says that, when the fox does come in the poem, it is “coming about its own business”—
functioning as a fox—and is welcomed into the vacuum in the human head, the vacuum
created when instinct had to vacate a place for excessive thinking:
Till with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.

Making a fox-hole out of the human brain shows how Hughes here, as elsewhere in his poems,
dismisses sardonically the physical seat of learning. In this case, instinct replaces intellect. In
his verbal re-creation of the fox, Hughes disdains strict rhyme and iambic pentameter. Hughes’s
rhythm is mimetic, seeking to stimulate the action of the poem. The monosyllables in the
above-quoted, memorable lines really suggest the movement of the fox as it approaches the
safety of the metaphorical fox-hole. We have here the swift, sudden little trot, then the cautious
careful tread, then the confident measured pace. Indeed, Hughes has here given evidence of
his remarkable gift for embodying words with animal rhythm. Two of the critics, namely
Gifford and Roberts, agreeing with this opinion, say that the mimetic language here works in
two ways: It evokes the movements of the fox, and those movements in turn provide an image
for the movement of the poem itself. Another critic gives high praise to this poem which, he
says, embodies an abstraction suggested by the very title of the poem. The title gives us a clear
clue to the poem’s theme which is a “thought” coming to life on the “printed page” like a wild
beast invading the poet’s mind. The process, says this critic, is described in exquisite gradations,
from the first moment when

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest;
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
After an interval, the living metaphor moves into the poem:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement
The movement is completed in the last stanza:
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

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