Page 384 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 31: Hughes and T.S. Eliot

And this blank page where my fingers move. Notes
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

31.1.3 Themes

Hughes’ earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals,
and an interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the
natural world. Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for the
survival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success. Examples can
be seen in the poems “Hawk Roosting” and “Jaguar”.
The West Riding dialect of Hughes’ childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending
a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful. The manner of speech renders
the hard facts of things and wards off self-indulgence.

Hughes later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition,
heavily inflected with a modernist, Jungian and ecological viewpoint. He re-
worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-
conscious.

31.1.4 Detailed Analysis
“The Thought-Fox” is a poem about writing a poem; it explicates the nature of literary inspiration
and literary creation. The action of the poem takes place at midnight where the poet is sitting alone at
his desk accompanied only by the ticking off the clock. The image evoked is one of quiet and solitude
where the poet is cut off from the world ready to be transported by his literary imagination. The
poet’s imagination is like a presence which disturbs the stillness of the night, the stillness of things yet
unknown, and is depicted as if creeping silently upon the poet evoking a sense of stealth:

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