The Thought Fox, by Ted HughesI 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.

ABOUT THE POET:

Edward James "Ted" Hughes, OM (17 August 1930 - 28 October 1998) was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation.[1] Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.

Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30.[2] His part in the relationship became controversial to some feminists and (particularly) American admirers of Plath. His last poetic work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their complex relationship. These poems make reference to Plath's suicide, but none of them addresses directly the circumstances of her death. A poem discovered in October 2010, Last letter, describes what happened during the three days leading up to Plath's suicide. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

POEM 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 of 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: 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 materialize 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. 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.

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock's loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move

The midnight is chosen at the time as it is without any addition to the day, as blank as the poet's mind itself. The time is unmarked and yet mature. The clock is alone as it is devoid of minutes and seconds, it being midnight. Further, the clock is alive as it is lonely. And there is something else that accompanies the loneliness of the clock that is the poet's creative consciousness. The metaphor for the poet's fresh poetic perception is the "blank paper" where his fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness.

Note that the poet cannot observe any star but can comprehend something that holds more promise for him. He cannot apprehend it through the senses but experience it through instinct..The image is first formless and can only be a professed feeling formless as the poetic vision of the poet itself until it assumes concrete shape. It does not enter in a strained and enforced manner but as delicately as snow falls in. The fox's nose touches deftly against the twig, leaf. The nose feels its way through the darkness. At once the fox transforms itself to the concrete and persistent image of the poet's creative working progress. By utilizing an animal as the reflection for his thought process, one wonders whetherTed Hughes writes primarily through instinct.

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

These eyes look to the readers like both the fox's eyes and also the poet's' studied' eye movements. The fox goes on to set neat prints' on the snow, the writing comes across coherently and clearly on the paper. The soft snow brushing against the trees falls in dark flakes to the ground, as the words on the blank paper, and in a lovely manner fall into place. The words:" now/And again now, and now, and now "point to the continuity that has been picked up by the poet. The continuity is accompanied by "punctuation'-therefore it is a staggering continuity; the idea being reinforced by the word 'lame'. The predictable rhyme scheme is also departed from, reflecting urgency on the part of the poet and the fox to reach their destination disregarding rhythm for the time being. The movement of the lines voice the movement of the fox. Alliteration is utilized to mime coherence. Though at first, the fox is agile, it staggers occasionally

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

At times, it appears like" a lame shadow' endeavoring to pick up speed and accelerate towards the final goal. The term stump' refers to the base of the tree that is incomplete without the tree-top. The stump' at once functions as a invasive metaphor for the writer's block. The poet has to make his creativity go beyond the stump' and not leave his poetic capabilities stunted'. It' is inthe hollow of a body that is "bold to come", yet to flourish and blossom.

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Across the clearings and the undergrowth, there is indeed "an eye". The "eye" standing for insight here. This insight is coupled with a widening and deepening "greenness",. The greenness symbolizing fertility and creation at once. Its business is that of its own, not one of after-thought, but that of impulse.

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.

.The poet thought process is filled with hot stink" of the fox, the heat of its passion. The thought-process is saturated now, and hence hot and humid. As the poem comes into place, the window is starless still. The poet at had first set eyes outside the window, for inspiration. Nevertheless, towards the end of the poem he comes to recognize that inspiration comes from within,and not outside. The window is starless still, yet-"the page is printed" Intuition reigns over inspiration here, and instinct over reason.

Its external action takes place in a room late at night where the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is starless, silent, and totally black. But the poet senses a presence which disturbs him:

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness.

The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night, for the night is itself a metaphor for the deeper and more intimate darkness of the poet's imagination in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines; it is not seen but felt - frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet's task is to coax it out of formlessness and into fuller consciousness by the sensitivity of his language. The remote stirrings of the poem are compared to the stirrings of an animal - a fox, whose body is invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously through the dark undergrowth:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;

The half-hidden image which is contained within these lines is of soft snow brushing against the trees as it falls in dark flakes to the ground. The idea of the delicate dark snow evokes the physical reality of the fox's nose which is itself cold, dark and damp, twitching moistly and gently against twig and leaf. In this way the first feature of the fox is mysteriously defined and its wet black nose is nervously alive in the darkness, feeling its way towards us. But by inverting the natural order of the simile, and withholding the subject of the sentence, the poet succeeds in blurring its distinctness so that the fox emerges only slowly out of the formlessness of the snow. Gradually the fox's eyes appear out of the same formlessness, leading the shadowy movement of its body as it comes closer:

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. ..

In the first two lines of this passage the rhythm of the verse is broken by the punctuation and the line-endings, while at the same time what seemed the predictable course of the rhyme-scheme is deliberately departed from. Both rhythmically and phonetically the verse thus mimes the nervous, unpredictable movement of the fox as it delicately steps forward, then stops suddenly to check the terrain before it runs on only to stop again. The tracks which the fox leaves in the snow are themselves duplicated by the sounds and rhythm of the line 'Sets neat prints into the snow'. The first three short words of this line are internal half-rhymes, as neat, as identical and as sharply outlined as the fox's paw-marks, and these words press down gently but distinctly into the soft open vowel of 'snow'. The fox's body remains indistinct, a silhouette against the snow. But the phrase 'lame shadow' itself evokes a more precise image of the fox, as it freezes alertly in its tracks, holding one front-paw in mid-air, and then moves off again like a limping animal. At the end of the stanza the words 'bold to come' are left suspended - as though the fox is pausing at the outer edge of some trees. The gap between the stanzas is itself the clearing which the fox, after hesitating warily, suddenly shoots across: 'Of a body that is bold to come / Across clearings. ..'

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.

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