Page 77 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Elective English–II

Notes (c) hate (d) none of these

4. The Thought Fox is:
(a) an animal poem (b) a love poem
(c) a nature poem (d) none of these.

5.6 Summary

• “The Thought Fox” is a poem of twenty-four lines divided into six stanzas. The title
tells the reader that the poet is drawing an analogy between a thought—specifically, in
this case, a poetic composition—and a fox.
• The poet speaks in the first person and in his own persona. He begins by evoking the
silence and mystery of a forest at midnight. An atmosphere of suspense is created as
one becomes aware of “something else” that is alive in the imaginary forest outside.
The world of the forest is set against the world of the room where the poet is working,
characterised only by the presence of a clock and the poet’s as yet blank paper.
• The second stanza intensifies the suspense. The poet shifts his perspective, taking the
reader’s awareness outside the room as he looks through the window into the black,
starless night. The “something” is approaching, beginning to solidify out of the darkness.
The third stanza gives the first tangible sense of the creature in the form of the fox’s
cold nose investigating the surrounding twigs and leaves.
• The poet introduces the fox into the reader’s sensory field in parts: a nose, then two
eyes, as the fox stealthily moves between the trees of the silent, snowbound forest, then
the whole body as it flashes across clearings. The fox in its literal sense as a fox is fully
realized by the fifth stanza; it is “Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own
business.”
• The final stanza is a sudden and shocking transition back to the fox as a metaphor for
thought. “With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox. It enters the dark hole of the head.”
The reader is reminded that, although the poet has presented a vivid picture of a fox,
he was all the time comparing it with the creative process. Like the fox in the darkness
of the forest, a thought begins in the subconscious mind as a vague sense or movement.
As it rises to the conscious level of the mind, it becomes increasingly concrete and
definite, until it finally “enters the dark hole of the head” as a conscious, coherent
thought.
• The reader is brought back to the poet’s room with a reference to the window, “starless
still.” One senses the unbounded, uncreated reality that underlies individualized creation,
unchanged and undiminished by the ever-changing manifestations that emerge from it.
The ticking of the clock brings one back from the timeless world of the imagination to
the world of time and space. “The page is printed” states that the thought has taken
its final form—as the very poem that is before the reader. The poet has witnessed the
act of his own poetic creation. Thus the poem is reflexive; it is a poem about its own
composition.

5.7 Keywords

Coherent : (of a person) Able to speak clearly and logically: “after one beer, he is
not coherent.

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