Literary Musings ...

THE THOUGHT-FOX

Introduction:

THE ‘Thought-Fox’ HAS often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realised 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 anthologised of all Hughes’s poems. It is a poem of twenty-four lines divided into six stanzas. The title tells the reader that the poet is drawing an analogy between a thought—specifically, in this case, a poetic composition—and a fox.

A Poem about Writing a Poem:

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.

Night as a Metaphor for the Poet’s Imagination:

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.

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 conciousness. The metaphor for the poet's fresh poetic perception is the "blank paper" where his fingers move.

The Composition of the Poem:

The image is first formless and can only be a professed feeling formless as the poetic vision of the poet itself, until it assumes concreteshape. 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 whether Ted Hughes writes primarily through instinct.

The Fox is the Poem and the Poem is the Fox:

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 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.’

Conclusion:

Thus Ted Hughes emphasizes how important the imagination is, when creating a picture with words. The fact that he calls it a ‘thought-fox’ reveals that the fox is not real, it is imaginary. 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.

[With due acknowledgements to Prof. Richard Webster and Ms.Rukhaya Mk.]

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