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Unit 31: Hughes and T.S. Eliot

of the thought-fox. If, at the end of the poem, there is one sense in which the fox is vividly and Notes
immediately alive, it is only because it has been pinned so artfully upon the page. The very accuracy
of the evocation of the fox seems at times almost fussily obsessive. The studied and beautifully
‘final’ nature of the poem indicates that we are not in the presence of any untrained spontaneity,
any primitive or naive vision. It might be suggested that the sensibility behind Hughes’s poem is
more that of an intellectual–an intellectual who, in rebellion against his own ascetic rationalism,
feels himself driven to hunt down and capture an element of his own sensual and intuitive identity
which he does not securely possess.
In this respect Hughes’s vision is perhaps most nearly akin to that of D. H. Lawrence, who was also
an intellectual in rebellion against his own rationalism, a puritan who never ceased to quarrel with
his own puritanism. But Lawrence’s animal poems, as some critics have observed, are very different
from those of Hughes. Lawrence has a much greater respect for the integrity and independence of
the animals he writes about. In ‘Snake’ he expresses remorse for the rationalistic, ‘educated’ violence
which he inflicts on the animal. And at the end of the poem he is able, as it were, retrospectively to
allow his dark sexual, sensual, animal alter ego to crawl off into the bowels of the earth, there to
reign alone and supreme in a kingdom where Lawrence recognises he can have no part. Hughes, in
‘The thought-fox’ at least, cannot do this. It would seem that, possessing his own sensual identity
even less securely than Lawrence, he needs the ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’ to pump up the
attenuated sense he has of the reality of his own body and his own feelings. And so he pins the fox
upon the page with the cruel purity of artistic form and locates its lair inside his own head. And the
fox lives triumphantly as an idea–as a part of the poet’s own identity–but dies as a fox.
If there is a difference between ‘The thought-fox’ and the animal poems of Lawrence there is also, of
course, a difference between Hughes’s poetic vision and that kind of extreme scientific rationalism
which both Lawrence and Hughes attack throughout their work. For in the mind of the orthodox
rationalist the fox is dead even as an idea. So it is doubly dead and the orthodox rationalist, who is
always a secret puritan, is more than happy about this. For he doesn’t want the hot sensual reek of
fox clinging to his pure rational spirit, reminding him that he once possessed such an obscene thing
as a body.
This difference may appear absolute. But it seems to me that it would be wrong to regard it as such,
and that there is a much closer relationship between the sensibility which is expressed in Hughes’s
poem and the sensibility of ‘puritanical rationalism’ than would generally be acknowledged. The
orthodox rationalist, it might be said, inflicts the violence of reason on animal sensuality in an
obsessive attempt to eliminate it entirely. Hughes in ‘The thought-fox’ unconsciously inflicts the
violence of an art upon animal sensuality in a passionate but conflict-ridden attempt to incorporate
it into his own rationalist identity.
The conflict of sensibility which Hughes unconsciously dramatises in ‘The thought-fox’ runs through
all his poetry. On the one hand there is in his work an extraordinary sensuous and sensual generosity
which coexists with a sense of abundance and a capacity for expressing tenderness which are unusual
in contemporary poetry .These qualities are particularly in evidence in some of the most mysteriously
powerful of all his poems–poems such as ‘Crow’s undersong’, ‘Littleblood’, ‘Full moon and little
Frieda’ and ‘Bride and groom lie hidden for three days’ .On the other hand his poetry–and above all
his poetry in Crow –is notorious for the raging intensity of its violence, a violence which, by some
critics at least, has been seen as destructive of all artistic and human values. Hughes himself seems
consistently to see his own poetic sensitivity as ‘feminine’ and his poetry frequently gives the
impression that he can allow himself to indulge this sensitivity only within a protective shell of
hard, steely ‘masculine’ violence.
In ‘The thought-fox’ itself this conflict of sensibility appears in such an attenuated or suppressed
form that it is by no means the most striking feature of the poem. But, as I have tried to show, the
conflict may still be discerned. It is present above all in the tension between the extraordinary
sensuous delicacy of the image which Hughes uses to describe the fox’s nose and the predatory,

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