Page 387 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes At this point in the poem the hesitant rhythm of that single sentence which is prolonged over five
stanzas breaks into a final and deliberate run. The fox has scented safety. After its dash across the
clearing of the stanza-break, it has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet and upon the
reader:

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

It is so close now that its two eyes have merged into a single green glare which grows wider and
wider as the fox comes nearer, its eyes heading directly towards ours: ‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot
stink of fox/It enters the dark hole of the head’. If we follow the ‘visual logic’ of the poem we are
compelled to imagine the fox actually jumping through the eyes of the poet – with whom the reader
of the poem is inevitably drawn into identification. The fox enters the lair of the head as it would
enter its own lair, bringing with it the hot, sensual, animal reek of its body and all the excitement
and power of the achieved vision.
The fox is no longer a formless stirring somewhere in the dark depths of the bodily imagination; it
has been coaxed out of the darkness and into full consciousness. It is no longer nervous and
vulnerable, but at home in the lair of the head, safe from extinction, perfectly created, its being
caught for ever on the page. And all this has been done purely by the imagination. For in reality
there is no fox at all, and outside, in the external darkness, nothing has changed: ‘The window is
starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.’ The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox.
‘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.’
After discussing ‘The thought-fox’ in his book The Art of Ted Hughes, Keith Sagar writes: ‘Suddenly,
out of the unknown, there it is, with all the characteristics of a living thing–“a sudden sharp hot
stink of fox”. A simple trick like pulling a kicking rabbit from a hat, but only a true poet can do it’.
In this particular instance it seems to me that the simile Sagar uses betrays him into an inappropriate
critical response His comparison may be apt in one respect, for it is certainly true that there is a
powerful element of magic in the poem. But this magic has little to do with party-conjurors who
pull rabbits out of top-hats. It is more like the sublime and awesome magic which is contained in
the myth of creation, where God creates living beings out of nothingness by the mere fiat of his
imagination.
The very sublimity and God-like nature of Hughes’s vision can engender uneasiness. For Hughes’s
fox has none of the freedom of an animal. It cannot get up from the page and walk off to nuzzle its
young cubs or do foxy things behind the poet’s back. It cannot even die in its own mortal, animal
way. For it is the poet’s creature, wholly owned and possessed by him, fashioned almost egotistically
in order to proclaim not its own reality but that of its imaginatively omnipotent creator. (I originally
wrote these words before coming across Hughes’s own discussion of the poem in Poetry in the
Making: ‘So, you see, in some ways my fox is better than an ordinary fox. It will live for ever, it will
never suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go. And I made it. And all through
imagining it clearly enough and finding the living words’.
This feeling of uneasiness is heightened by the last stanza of the poem. For although this stanza
clearly communicates the excitement of poetic creation, it seems at the same time to express an
almost predatory thrill; it is as though the fox has successfully been lured into a hunter’s trap. The
bleak matter-of-factness of the final line–’The page is printed’–only reinforces the curious deadness

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