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Unit 5: The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes

The window is starless still, the clock ticks, Notes

The page is printed.
I
Something like the effect in this poem of the physical realization of a meaning, quick with its
own rank presence, occurs in all the best works of Hughes. Another critic, Seamus Heaney,
also has something illuminating to say about this poem. Hughes’s aspiration, in these early
poems, says this critic, is to command all the elements which make up the poetic effect in
order to bring them within the jurisdiction of his authoritarian voice. The first line of this
poem, for instance, is hushed, but it is a hush achieved by the quelling action of the m’s and
d’s and t’s: “I imagine this midnight moment’s forest”. The last stanza of the poem, according
to this critic, is characterized by the shooting of the monosyllabic consonantal bolts. Yet another
critic, Alan Bold, offers the following valuable comment: “Hughes invests his poems with a
dream-like quality, a kind of reverie. It is not surprising that such a reverie on a cold winter’s
night produced The Thought Fox.”
II
“The Thought Fox” is a poem about writing a poem and not at all about an animal. The fox
in the poem is the poetic energy or inspiration that comes out of darkness (the unconscious)
and leaves its footprints on snow, the blank white page. But the annual image in the title as
well as the movement of the symbolic animal in the poem is not only appropriate in its own
context but also consistent with Ted Hughes concept of poetic composition which he compared
with the capturing of animals:
The special kind of excitement, the slightly mesmerized and quite involuntary concentration
with which you make out the stirrings of a new poem in your mind, then the outline, the mass
and colour and clear final form of it, the unique living reality of it in the midst of the general
lifelessness, all that is too familiar to mistake. This is hunting and the poem is a new species
of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.
The secret, says Hughes, is to “imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. … Just
look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn your self into it. When you do this, the words look
after themselves, like magic.” This is borne out by the present poem in which a kind of drama
goes on between the “I” that imagines and the “I” that perceives. At the beginning of the poem
it is the self, the persona that imagines the fox and its slow animal movement which the
rhythm of the poem supports; then, toward the end, in a climactic manner, the fox enters the
“dark hole of the head” of perceiving persona with the sting in the tail that “the page is
printed.” The last lines, comments Thomas West, “where we turn to the ticking clock but
discover now a printed page reveal an external world of time and long dead imaginings (in
print), which feels very distant from the imaginative act, this dark and secret reality of the
mind’s possession by something akin, in its apartness and its energy, to the jaguar.”
Apart from the interesting drama that goes in it, “The Thought Fox” reveals Ted Hughes’
subtle artistry. The very movement of the poem is like the movement of a fox in the darkness:
The language mimes in sound and rhythm what it describes:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches a twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow

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