Page 385 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes “Through the window I see no star:

Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:”

The night itself is of course a metaphor for the more intimate darkness of the poet’s imagination
and creative inspiration that creeps silently and without warning upon the poet, “cold, delicately as
the dark snow”. The mysterious nature of the stirrings of imagination is compared to the indistinct
shadow of a fox that moves stealthily in the darkness of the night. The shadow in the night suggests
the amorphousness and abstract nature of literary inspiration that sneaks in like a fox mysteriously
and without warning. The fox seems to materialise out of the formlessness of the snow, it is a faint
shadow against the snow that will take the form “of a body that is bold to come”. The image of the
fox taking shape is thus equivalent to the process of creative imagination, which slowly forms itself
in the dark recesses of the poet’s mind to produce a work of art:
“Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.”

The fox penetrates the deep and intimate darkness of the poet’s mind to evoke the moment when
the desirable vision is attained. The poem ends as it has begun, turning in full circle.

“The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.”

The fox is the process of artistic creation that is almost a mystical experience forming itself out of
nothingness through the poetic imagination. “And I suppose,” Ted Hughes has written, “that long
after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up
somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them”. The fox, therefore, also seems to
represent the epiphanies of reading that embrace the reader when he becomes engrossed in reading
a work of art.

Write a short note on “The Thought Fox.”

Ted Hughes’s “The Thought Fox” enacts the solitude that surrounds a work of art. In Hughes’s
poem, we perceive that the last line also has a sort of fatalism and a notion of wistfulness. For
although, the last stanza expresses the excitement of poetic creation, the matter-of-factness of the
last line seems to plunge us back to reality evoking an almost palpable sense of relief that the poem
is over. The blank white page full of potentiality for poetry is now printed and the writer knows
that the poem that has been written is always a pale reflection of the poem or poems that could have
been written.
The Thought Fox has often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realised and artistically
satisfying of the poems in Ted Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain. At the same time it
is one of the most frequently anthologised of all Hughes’s poems. In this essay I have set out to use
what might be regarded as a very ordinary analysis of this familiar poem in order to focus attention
on an aspect of Hughes’s poetry which is sometimes neglected. My particular interest is in the

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