The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes poem line by line explanation, British Literature - III, 2nd Year 3rd Semester, B.A English Literature

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BA English Literature

 [2nd Year, 3rd Semester]

 British Literature  

The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes

About Poet: 

Ted Hughes (Edward James Hughes) was born in Yorkshire in 1930. An incredibly prolific poet, translator, editor, and children’s book author. In 1956 he met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath. Plath encouraged Hughes to submit his first manuscript, “The Hawk in the Rain”, to The Poetry Center's First Publication book contest.

Hughes won many of Europe’s highest literary honors, and was appointed Poet Laureate of England in 1984, a post he held until his death. He passed away in October 28, 1998, in Devonshire, England, from cancer.

About Poem: 

    The Thought Fox is a six stanza poem by Ted Hughes about creativity, inspiration, and the process of writing poetry. It was published in Hughes's first collection, “The Hawk in the Rain”, 1957. 

Hughes is popularly known for the use of animal imagery. The title of the poem itself is loaded with animal imagery where the fox is compared with the thought process of a writer before composing something great.

It represents a very personal description of the experience of being an artist producing poetry.

Poem:

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock’s loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

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

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

Summary:

    ‘The Thought-Fox’ starts on a silent, clear night. The speaker of the poem sitting alone at his desk and tries to write a poem, but has no luck with it. The sound of the ticking clock and the blank page before him taunting him. He casts around for inspiration, but rejects the typical poetic trope of the stars (‘I see no star’), instead sensing ‘something more near / though deeper within darkness’ the arrival of a fox into his ‘loneliness’.

    The absence of stars signals the speaker's lack of inspiration, but his intuition that an idea may be growing closer causes him to gaze deeper into the darkness outside, into the darkness within his mind.

    The idea itself is symbolized by the fox’s presence, and at first, it is not clear what the idea is, to the poet. Then the Poet starts to describe the fox through a series of parts, and through a highly focused sequence of images. First, the poet homes in on the fox's nose "delicately" touching the tree branch. Then, he concentrates on the fox's "two eyes" which "serve a moment, that now/ And again.../ Sets neat prints into the snow," which evokes an image of the fox looking down, cautiously measuring his steps. 

    Finally, the poet describes the fox's shadow, which "warily.../...lags" by a tree stump, "in hollow" of the fox's body. This strategy allows us to develop a complete image of the fox through the actions and specific features the poet emphasizes. Now the fox is suddenly visible, the idea is suddenly within the poet’s mind, and has been immortalized on the page. The fox's "neat prints" are like a poet's precise language, careful and deliberate, each with its proper place and meaning. The poem and the fox exist as one entity.

    The poet successfully writes his poem, as if printing his words across the white page is simply a case of mirroring the paw-prints of the animal Thought-Fox Ted Hughes across the snow. The Thought-Fox’ moves almost like clockwork, starting out at an hour crawl, and quickening, the image of the fox becoming more concrete, until the final staggering end where the fox comes out in a rush – again, symbolized in the way that Hughes writes about it – only to dim back down into quiet – ‘the window is starless still; the clock ticks; / The page is printed’.

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