College of Education for Humanities - Department of English 4th year – poetry 2nd course

“The thought fox” by Ted Hughes

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.

1
The „THOUGHT-FOX‟ has often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realized
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 anthologized of all Hughes‟s poems. The
particular interest is in the underlying puritanism of Hughes‟s poetic vision and in the conflict
between violence and tenderness which seems to be directly engendered by this puritanism.
„The thought-fox‟ is a poem about writing a poem. 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 (get0 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
2
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

3
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 forever 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.‟[1]

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‟.[2] 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
4
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 forever, 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‟ (p. 21).)
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 of the thought-fox. If, at the end of the poem, there is one sense
in which the fox is vividly and 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.
The conflict of sensibility which Hughes unconsciously dramatizes 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

5
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, impulse which seems to underlie the poem – an impulse to which Hughes has
himself drawn attention by repeatedly comparing the act of poetic creation to the process of
capturing or killing small animals.[3] Indeed it might be suggested that the last stanza of the
poem records what is, in effect, a ritual of tough „manly‟ posturing. For in it the poet might be
seen as playing a kind of imaginative game in which he attempts to outstare the fox – looking
straight into its eyes as it comes closer and closer and refusing to move, refusing to flinch,
refusing to show any sign of „feminine‟ weakness. The fox itself does not flinch or deviate from
its course. It is almost as though, in doing this, it has successfully come through an initiation-
ritual to which the poet has unconsciously submitted it; the fox which is initially nervous,
circumspect, and as soft and delicate as the dark snow, has proved that it is not „feminine‟ after
all but tough, manly and steely willed „brilliantly, concentratedly, coming about its own
business‟. It is on these conditions alone, perhaps, that its sensuality can be accepted by the
poet without anxiety.

The conflict between violence and tenderness which is present in an oblique form
throughout Hughes‟ early poetry is one that is in no sense healed or resolved in his later work.
Indeed it might be suggested that much of the poetic and emotional charge of this later work
comes directly from an intensification of this conflict and an increasingly explicit polarization
of its terms. The repressed tenderness of „Snowdrop‟ or the tough steely sensibility which is
expressed in „Thrushes‟, with its idealization of the „bullet and automatic / Purpose‟ of
instinctual life, is seemingly very different to the all but unprotected sensuous delicacy of
„Littleblood‟, the poem with which Hughes ends Crow:
O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
6
Ploughing with a linnet‟s carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
....
Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.

But this poem must ultimately be located within the larger context which is provided by the
Crow poems. This context is one of a massive unleashing of sadistic violence -a violence which
is never endorsed by Hughes but which, nevertheless, seems to provide a kind of necessary
psychological armour within which alone tenderness can be liberated without anxiety.
In pointing to the role which is played by a particular conflict of sensibility in Hughes‟s poetry
I am not in any way seeking to undermine the case which can – and should – be made for what
would conventionally be called Hughes‟s poetic „greatness‟. Indeed, my intention is almost the
reverse of this. For it seems to me that one of the factors which moderates or diminishes the
imaginative power of some of Hughes‟s early poetry is precisely the way in which an acute
conflict which is central to his own poetic sensibility tends to be disguised or, suppressed. In
Crow, which I take to be Hughes‟s most extraordinary poetic achievement to date, Hughes,
almost for the first time, assumes imaginative responsibility for the puritanical violence which
is present in his poetry from the very beginnings. In doing so he seems to take full possession of
his own poetic powers. It is as though a conflict which had, until that point, led a shadowy and
underworld existence, is suddenly cracked open in order to disgorge not only its own violence
but also all that imaginative wealth and vitality which had been half locked up within it.

The most obvious precedent for such a violent eruption of imaginative powers is that which is
provided by Shakespeare, and perhaps above all by King Lear. Lear is a play of extraordinary
violence whose persistent image, as Caroline Spurgeon has observed, is that „of a human body
in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed,
gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack‟.[5] But at the same time it is a play
about a man who struggles to repossess his own tenderness and emotional vitality and to weep
those tears which, at the beginning of the play, he contemptuously dismisses as soft, weak and
womanly. The same conflict reappears throughout Shakespeare‟s poetry. We have only to recall
7
Lady Macbeth‟s renunciation of her own „soft‟ maternal impulses in order to appreciate the
fluency of Shakespeare‟s own imaginative access to this conflict and the disturbing cruelty of
its terms:
I have given suck, and know
How tender „tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash‟d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (I. vii)
The intense conflict between violence and tenderness which is expressed in these lines is, of
course, in no sense one which will be found only in the poetic vision of Hughes and
Shakespeare. It is present in poetry from the Old Testament onwards and indeed it might
reasonably be regarded as a universal conflict, within which are contained and expressed some
of the most fundamental characteristics of the human identity.
Any full investigation of the conflict and of its cultural significance would inevitably need to
take account both of what Mark Spilka has called „Lawrence‟s quarrel with tenderness‟ and of
Ian Suttie‟s discussion of the extent and rigour of the „taboo on tenderness‟ in our own
culture.[6] But such an investigation would also need to take into consideration a much larger
cultural context, and perhaps above all to examine the way in which the Christian ideal of love
has itself traditionally been expressed within the medium of violent apocalyptic fantasies.
The investigation which I describe is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. My more modest
aim here has been to draw attention to the role which is played by this conflict in two of the
most hauntingly powerful of Ted Hughes‟s early poems and to suggest that Hughes‟s poetic
powers are fully realized not when this conflict is resolved but when it is unleashed in its most
violent form.
In taking this approach I am motivated in part by the feeling that the discussion of Hughes‟s
poetry has sometimes been too much in thrall to a powerful cultural image of Hughes‟s poetic
personality – one which he himself has tended to project. In this image Hughes is above all an
isolated and embattled figure who has set himself against the entire course both of modern
poetry and of modern history .He is rather like the hero in one of his most powerful poems
„Stealing trout on a May morning‟, resolutely and stubbornly wading upstream, his feet rooted
8
in the primeval strength of the river‟s bed as the whole course of modern history and modern
puritanical rationalism floods violently past him in the opposite direction, bearing with it what
Hughes himself has called „mental disintegration … under the super-ego of Moses … and the
self-anaesthetizing schizophrenia of St Paul‟, and leaving him in secure possession of that
ancient and archaic imaginative energy which he invokes in his poetry.
The alternative to this Romantic view of Hughes‟s poetic personality is to see Hughes‟s poetry
as essentially the poetry of an intellectual, an intellectual who is subject to the rigours of
„puritanical rationalism‟ just as much as any other intellectual but who, instead of submitting to
those rigours, fights against them with that stubborn and intransigent resolution which belongs
only to the puritan soul.
In reality perhaps neither of these views is wholly appropriate, and the truth comes somewhere
between the two. But what does seem clear is that when Hughes talks of modern civilization as
consisting in „mental disintegration. ..under the super-ego of Moses … and the self-
anaesthetizing schizophrenia of St Paul‟ he is once again engaging in that characteristic strategy
of externalizing a conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. For it must be suggested
that Paul‟s own „schizophrenia‟ consisted in an acute conflict between the impulse towards
tenderness, abundance and generosity and the impulse towards puritanical violence – the
violence of chastity. It is precisely this conflict which seems to be buried in Hughes‟s early
poetry and which, as I have suggested, eventually erupts in the poetry of Crow. If, in Crow,
Hughes is able to explore and express the internalized violence of the rationalist sensibility with
more imaginative power than any other modern poet, it is perhaps because he does so from
within a poetic sensibility which is itself profoundly intellectual, and deeply marked by that
very puritanical rationalism which he so frequently – and I believe justifiably – attacks.