The Thought Fox

Ted Hughes
The Thought Fox is not difficult for most people to understand. It is a poem about writing poetry.
The idea for the poem comes like a fox in the night. First formless and indistinct it needs to be
gently charmed out of the darkness and into light until its form takes shape. Most people also
recognize that the night is a metaphor for the stillness of the poets imagination.
Symbolism
The poem opens on the words I imagine this midnight moments forest. We know that we are
not dealing with a literal forest, but with an imagined one. And something else is alive in the
imaginary forest.
The fox is a metaphor for the idea of a poem. If that is so, our metaphorical fox most likely
comes to our writer out of a metaphorical night.
Hughes tells us that the night is starless, silent, very dark and lonely. Describing the night as
lonely is a good clue to the fact that the night is a metaphor or a symbol for something else
because the night cannot literally be lonely. One might feel lonely during the nighttime, but then
that is a sensation experienced by a person. It is not a characteristic of the night itself.
Metaphor
The metaphor works so well. A thought, an idea, is formless and without shape. One is never
sure where it comes from. He captures the formlessness by letting us glimpse only the eye, the
shadow, the prints, smelling the fox. It is never described. He places it, too, in a formless
environment: a blank page, snow and night. One cannot know where fox begins and snow ends.
There is another thing worth noticing about the metaphor. The fox began as something imagined
external to the poet in the forest but ends lodged inside the poets head. The head is its lair, its
resting place. A transition has occurred. The page is printed, but otherwise all is the same. The
window is still starless and the clock still ticks.
Hughes earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of
animals.
ANALYSIS:
The Thought-Fox has often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realized and
artistically satisfying of the poems. It is a poem about reflecting the processing of 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.
In the two first paragraphs we can observe how the author is describing the environment, he also
has in front of him a blank page where his fingers move, and as he says Through the window I
see no star. But inside that completely darkness we can find the loneliness. According to the poet
the modern life is full of loneliness.
 The idea of the gentle dark snow suggests the physical reality of the foxs 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. Gradually the foxs eyes appear out of the same formlessness, leading the shadowy
movement of its body as it comes closer.
The fox has scented safety. It has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet (and upon
the reader). 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.
If we follow the full poem the visual logic of the poem makes us to imagine the fox actually
jumping through the eyes of the poet.
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 rhyme structure followed is A / A / B / B in the first stanza but in the second stanza it
changes to C / C / D / D.
The poem deals with 6 stanzas and 4 completed lines. Each stanza deals with 4 incomplete lines
and the author uses the present tense in this poem because it is a recent event. And the metaphors
are clearly noticeable during the poem because, if I have understood correctly the poem, the
poem is itself a metaphor. The fox is the entire poem itself. The poet has also used many
dramatic themes and words which make the poem more attractive.
"CHAUCER" by Ted Hughes
INTRODUCTION
The poem Chaucer as its name clearly suggests, is a tribute from Ted Hughes to the great
English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. In one of his interviews talking about influences on his poetry
Hughes said: .One poet I have read more than any of these is Chaucer. In this poem,
Chaucer Hughes advocates in reply to the criticism from conservative and conventional critics
on Chaucers treatment of thought of metre.
The very first line of the poem what that Aprille with his shoures soote serves as a
literary allusion and directly refers to the prologue of the all-time-famous creation of Chaucer:
Canterbury Tales. According to Hughes, the shower of Chaucers verse has cleaned and
rendered freshness to the bushes and plants. It suggests that the poetry of Chaucer rendered a
freshness to and newness to the prevailing poetic tradition of his times.
Chaucer is considered to be the father of English literature. He stands head and shoulders above
the classical figures of the English literature. His experimentation with metre and language paved
the way for modern poetry with realistic approach. That is what Hughes has tried to set in this
poem.
CRITICAL APPRECIATION
Chaucer as its name suggests, is a tribute from Ted Hughes to the great English poet, Geoffrey
Chaucer. In one of his interviews talking about influences on his poetry Hughes said: .One
poet I have read more than any of these is Chaucer. In Chaucer Hughes stands in face of the
criticism from conservative and conventional critics on Chaucers treatment of thought of metre
and defends Chaucer.
The very first line of the poem what that Aprille with his shoures soote serves as a
literary allusion and directly refers to the prologue of the all-time-famous creation of Chaucer:
Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is considered to be the father of English literature. His
experimentation with metre and language paved the way for modern poetry with realistic
approach. Talking about the less knowledgeable critics who criticise Chaucers experimentation
with metre and poetic art, Hughes calls them cows for they keep on practicing and preaching
the old ideas like cows who keep on chewing the fodder. They are not ready to accept the change
and freshness brought to literature. Hughes talks about their animal instinct that attracts them to
sensual beauty of nature. The poem moves ahead with a slow tempo. Hughes starts it by quoting
a line from Prologue to Canterbury Tales and then moves on to introduce us with Chaucers art
and work. Hughes seems to have two kind of groups in his mind: one, the readers who shall read
this poem, the other, the imaginary audience whom he is looking with his poetic eye and at the
same time he has in his mind the actual critics who talk against Chaucers art and techniques
though the imaginary audience and the actual somewhat anti-Chaucerian critics are part of one
whole. It is, no doubt, his poetic skills that he takes along these groups skilfully with the flow of
the poem. The poem has, clearly, a satirical note in it however it has a blend of humour as well.
Hughess branding the name cows for the so called critics and their reaction to the character of
wife of Bath are noteworthy in this respect. The language of the poem is not a selected one or
some specific language. It is simple yet impressive and is beautified more with the imagery style
used by Hughes.
"CHAUCER" by Ted Hughes INTRODUCTION
The poem Chaucer as its name clearly suggests, is a tribute from Ted Hughes to the great
English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. In one of his interviews talking about influences on his poetry
Hughes said: .One poet I have read more than any of these is Chaucer. In this poem,
Chaucer Hughes advocates in reply to the criticism from conservative and conventional critics
on Chaucers treatment of thought of metre.
The very first line of the poem what that Aprille with his shoures soote serves as a literary
allusion and directly refers to the prologue of the all-time-famous creation of Chaucer:
Canterbury Tales. According to Hughes, the shower of Chaucers verse has cleaned and
rendered freshness to the bushes and plants. It suggests that the poetry of Chaucer rendered a
freshness to and newness to the prevailing poetic tradition of his times.
Chaucer is considered to be the father of English literature. He stands head and shoulders above
the classical figures of the English literature. His experimentation with metre and language paved
the way for modern poetry with realistic approach. That is what Hughes has tried to set in this
poem.
CRITICAL APPRECIATION
Chaucer as its name suggests, is a tribute from Ted Hughes to the great English poet, Geoffrey
Chaucer. In one of his interviews talking about influences on his poetry Hughes said: .One
poet I have read more than any of these is Chaucer. In Chaucer Hughes stands in face of the
criticism from conservative and conventional critics on Chaucers treatment of thought of metre
and defends Chaucer.
The very first line of the poem what that Aprille with his shoures soote serves as a literary
allusion and directly refers to the prologue of the all-time-famous creation of Chaucer:
Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is considered to be the father of English literature. His
experimentation with metre and language paved the way for modern poetry with realistic
approach. Talking about the less knowledgeable critics who criticise Chaucers experimentation
with metre and poetic art, Hughes calls them cows for they keep on practicing and preaching
the old ideas like cows who keep on chewing the fodder. They are not ready to accept the change
and freshness brought to literature. Hughes talks about their animal instinct that attracts them to
sensual beauty of nature. The poem moves ahead with a slow tempo. Hughes starts it by quoting
a line fromPrologue to Canterbury Tales and then moves on to introduce us with Chaucers art
and work. Hughes seems to have two kind of groups in his mind: one, the readers who shall read
this poem, the other, the imaginary audience whom he is looking with his poetic eye and at the
same time he has in his mind the actual critics who talk against Chaucers art and techniques
though the imaginary audience and the actual somewhat anti-Chaucerian critics are part of one
whole. It is, no doubt, his poetic skills that he takes along these groups skilfully with the flow of
the poem. The poem has, clearly, a satirical note in it however it has a blend of humour as well.
Hughess branding the name cows for the so called critics and their reaction to the character of
wife of Bath are noteworthy in this respect. The language of the poem is not a selected one or
some specific language. It is simple yet impressive and is beautified more with the imagery style
used by Hughes.
INTRODUCTION
The Thought-Fox was first published in The Hawk in the Rain (1957), a collection which
earned from Marianne Moore the following comment: Hughes talent is unmistakable, the work
has focus, is a glow with feeling, with conscience; sensibility is awake, embodied in appropriate
diction. This collection was judged the best by Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden and Stephen
Spender. The Thought-Fox is a poem about the very process of writing poetry, and about
poetic inspiration. The imaginary fox is a symbol of this inspiration which enters the mind of a
poet and leaves its footprints in the form of words on a white page.
The poet starts the poem with the words that it is a lonely room in a dark night. Everything is
quiet so that the tick-tick sound of the clock impresses upon the persona (the I in the poem) the
darkness, the silence and loneliness. The persona has a blank page before him and his fingers
move on it. Outside it is all dark; even the stars are not there in the sky. Yet deep in the darkness,
the persona sees something moving and entering the loneliness.
The presence that moves in deep darkness is like a fox touching the twigs and leaves with its
nose. What the persona sees are two eyes that move in the darkness and leave their footprints on
the snow. Then a lame, cautious body in the form of an eye comes brilliantly and concentratedly
toward the room. With the stink of a fox it enters the hole of the personas head. The window is
still without stars and is dark and lonely. The clock continues to tick and by now the page, the
blank page has received the footprints of the thought-fox in the form of a poem.
CRITICAL APPRECIATION
The Fox as a Symbol of Thought
The Thought-Fox describes, in an indirect or oblique manner, the process by which a poem gets
written. What a poet needs to write a poem is inspiration. A poet waits for the onrush of an idea
through his brain. And, of course, he also needs solitude (loneliness) and silence around him.
Solitude and silence are, however, only contributory circumstances. They constitute a favourable
environment, while the poem itself comes out of the poets head which has been invaded, as it
were, by an idea or thought. The idea or thought takes shape in his head like a fox entering a dark
forest and then coming out of it suddenly. That is why the phrase The Thought-Fox has been
used as a title for this poem. The fox embodies the thought which a poet expresses in his poem.
The fox here serves as a symbol.
Vivid Imagery in the Poem
The Thought-Fox was one of the outstanding poems in the volume called The Hawk in the
Rain. What is remarkable about this poem, apart from its symbolic statement of the process of
poetic composition, is its imagery. We have here a series of images in the poem, from the first
line to the last; and every image is a vivid one. The opening line contains the following image: I
imagine this midnight moments forest. Here the poet imagines that he is sitting in a forest
at midnight. Then follow the images of the lonely clock, the blank page, and the feeling that
something else is also alive around the poet. There are no stars in the sky; and then the poet
perceives something intruding upon his loneliness or solitude. Next, a foxs nose touches a twig
and then a leaf. The two eyes of the fox seem to be moving forward. The fox is leaving clear
footprints on the snow in the forest. The imagery continues with the eye of the fox brilliantly,
concentratedly, coming about its own business till it enters the dark hole of the head with a
sudden sharp hot stink of a fox. The window is starless still; the clock ticks even now; but the
page is no longer blank. The page carries a poem written by its author in his own handwriting,
even though the word printed has been used. The word printed is not absolutely
inappropriate because ultimately the poem written by its author would get printed.
A Poem without any Popular Appeal
The Thought-Fox has greatly been admired by critics; but it does not have much of an appeal for
the average reader. The poem contains an abstract idea which the poet has tried to concretize.
We, as average readers, cannot understand why a thought should be personified as a fox. To the
popular mind, a fox represents cunning. We have all heard the story of the fox who cheated a
crow of a piece of cheese which the crow held in its beak. The fox employed flattery to make the
crow open its beak so that the piece of cheese might fall from the beak for the fox to grab it. But
in this poem the fox has been elevated to the status of a poetic idea. Nor can we affirm that this
poem is remarkable because of its felicity of word and phrase. The only remarkable quality of
this poem is its imagery.
Comments by Some of the Critics
A critic expresses the view that in Hughess world the only way to come to terms with the
animals is not to tame them but to become possessed by them, and that this is what precisely
happens in the poem, The Thought-Fox. This critic regards The Thought-Fox as the finest of the
five animal poems in the volume entitled The Hawk in the Rain. Talking about his childhood
passion for capturing animals, Hughes has described the composition of this poem in the
following manner:
An animal I never succeeded in keeping alive is the fox. I was always frustrated: twice by a
farmer, who killed cubs I had caught before I could get to them, and once by a poultry-keeper
who freed my cub while his dog waited. Years after those events I was sitting up late one snowy
night in dreary lodgings in London. I had written nothing for a year or so but that night I got the
idea I might write something, and I wrote in a few minutes The Thought-Fox; the first animal
poem I ever wrote.
The same critic goes on to say that, although The Thought-Fox is a fox of the imagination, it has
been presented in the poem with a beautifully solid foxy reality. Continuing his comment, this
critic says that, when the fox does come in the poem, it is coming about its own business
functioning as a foxand is welcomed into the vacuum in the human head, the vacuum created
when instinct had to vacate a place for excessive thinking:
Till with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
Making a fox-hole out of the human brain shows how Hughes here, as elsewhere in his poems,
dismisses sardonically the physical seat of learning. In this case, instinct replaces intellect. In his
verbal re-creation of the fox, Hughes disdains strict rhyme and iambic pentameter. Hughess
rhythm is mimetic, seeking to stimulate the action of the poem. The monosyllables in the above-
quoted, memorable lines really suggest the movement of the fox as it approaches the safety of
the metaphorical fox-hole. We have here the swift, sudden little trot, then the cautious careful
tread, then the confident measured pace. Indeed, Hughes has here given evidence of his
remarkable gift for embodying words with animal rhythm. Two of the critics, namely Gifford and
Roberts, agreeing with this opinion, say that the mimetic language here works in two ways: It
evokes the movements of the fox, and those movements in turn provide an image for the
movement of the poem itself. Another critic gives high praise to this poem which, he says,
embodies an abstraction suggested by the very title of the poem. The title gives us a clear clue to
the poems theme which is a thought coming to life on the printed page like a wild beast
invading the poets mind. The process, says this critic, is described in exquisite gradations, from
the first moment when
I imagine this midnight moments forest;
Something else is alive
Beside the clocks loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
After an interval, the living metaphor moves into the poem:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A foxs nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement

The movement is completed in the last stanza:

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.
Something like the effect in this poem of the physical realization of a meaning, quick with its
own rank presence, occurs in all the best works of Hughes. Another critic, Seamus Heaney, also
has something illuminating to say about this poem. Hughess aspiration, in these early poems,
says this critic, is to command all the elements which make up the poetic effect in order to bring
them within the jurisdiction of his authoritarian voice. The first line of this poem, for instance, is
hushed, but it is a hush achieved by the quelling action of the ms and ds and ts: I imagine
this midnight moments forest. The last stanza of the poem, according to this critic, is
characterized by the shooting of the monosyllabic consonantal bolts. Yet another critic, Alan
Bold, offers the following valuable comment: Hughes invests his poems with a dream-like
quality, a kind of reverie. It is not surprising that such a reverie on a cold winters night
produced The Thought-Fox.
II
The Thought-Fox is a poem about writing a poem and not at all about an animal. The fox in
the poem is the poetic energy or inspiration that comes out of darkness (the unconscious) and
leaves its footprints on snow, the blank white page. But the annual image in the title as well as
the movement of the symbolic animal in the poem is not only appropriate in its own context but
also consistent with Ted Hughes concept of poetic composition which he compared with the
capturing of animals:
The special kind of excitement, the slightly mesmerized and quite involuntary concentration with
which you make out the stirrings of a new poem in your mind, then the outline, the mass and
colour and clear final form of it, the unique living reality of it in the midst of the general
lifelessness, all that is too familiar to mistake. This is hunting and the poem is a new species of
creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.
The secret, says Hughes, is to imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Just
look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn your self into it. When you do this, the words look
after themselves, like magic. This is borne out by the present poem in which a kind of drama
goes on between the I that imagines and the I that perceives. At the beginning of the poem it
is the self, the persona that imagines the fox and its slow animal movement which the rhythm of
the poem supports; then, toward the end, in a climactic manner, the fox enters the dark hole of
the head of perceiving persona with the sting in the tail that the page is printed. The last lines,
comments Thomas West, where we turn to the ticking clock but discover now a printed page
reveal an external world of time and long dead imaginings (in print), which feels very distant
from the imaginative act, this dark and secret reality of the minds possession by something akin,
in its apartness and its energy, to the jaguar.
Apart from the interesting drama that goes in it, The Thought-Fox reveals Ted Hughes subtle
artistry. The very movement of the poem is like the movement of a fox in the darkness: The
language mimes in sound and rhythm what it describes:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A foxs nose touches a 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 lone
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow.
As Keith comments, The poem has already sets neat prints upon the page in the line before we
are told that the fox sets them into the snow. The noun shadow has to drag itself across the gap
between the lines which separates it from its adjective. And the alliteration of lame and lag
upon a long palatal consonant mimes the meaning to a degree which becomes obvious if we try
to find a substitute for either word.
"FULL MOON AND LITTLE FRIEDA"
INTRODUCTION
This is rightly one of Hughess most popular poems and he has called it a favourite of his own.
The beauty and aptness of its movement could never have been predicted from most of the
poems in The Hawk in the Raineven The Thought-Fox is mechanical in comparison.
It is rare to find such freedom of line accompanied by such appropriateness and inevitability, so
that it seems to have a form as tight as a sonnetthe whole evening in one long line, the
listening child who is the focus of it in a balancing short one; the mirror poised between the
water of which it is composed and the star that it reflects; the herd of cows in a long, lazy line
that nevertheless doesnt fall apart.
The humour that belongs to the wonder is there throughout: in tempt; in the cows being
communally the river and individually the boulders that impede its progress; and above all in the
final two lines, where something of the artists wonder at the life of his work, the moons ancient
divinity, the childs suddenness and wholeness of attention, combine in a delicacy of suggestion
that really does defy analysis.
CRITICAL APPRECIATION
Both Full Moon and Little Frieda and Wodwo, the closing poems of Wodwo, present
affirmative experiences of congruence with a benign nature. The persona of Full Moon and
Little Frieda views the child as a mirror, a brimming pail of offering, who gazes at the moon,
the largest reflecting object in the cosmos available to the naked eye. The resulting astonishment
at the recognition of an identity of mirroring artworks is very striking and describes another
experience of the undifferentiated original essence of the cosmos, at times called by Buddhist
poets the full moon of suchness. When little Frieda speaks the word moon, one of the first
words she ever articulated as a toddler, subject and object, self and environment merge in ecstatic
recognition of self-in-other, in the clarity of spotless, mutually reflecting mirrors. The cows that
loop the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath earlier in the poem convey an almost
nativity-scene sense of the purity and supportiveness of a benign nature in attendance. The cows,
sacred in Oriental symbology as representations of the plenitude of creation, are an apt
background for Friedas offering of self as a brimming pail of youthful purity to an equally pure
moonlight.
In Full Moon and Little Frieda, for the first time, there is a moment of harmony:
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket
And you listening.
A spiders web, tense for the dews touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.
Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their
warm wreaths of breath
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
Moon! you cry suddenly, Moon! Moon!
The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.
The poem testifies in its delicacy of utterance, its utterly fresh sense of wonder, to the possibility
of knowing the redeemed life of joy in normal daily experience, when, with an unspectacular
access of grace, the elements of a scene human, animal, domestic, rural, cosmic suddenly
cohere to express a plenitude, all the malicious negatives miraculously melted away.
The evening has shrunk not only because the light is failing but also because, as it does so, time
seems to slow down, as it approaches that crucial moment of nightfall, dewfall, the first tremor
of the first star. And the poet is aware that his daughter is the hand; pointing to that moment
because she is utterly open, without I defences, without distracting consciousness of past and
future, to the scene, her fine web of senses perfectly tuned to it, tense as a spiders web,
brimming as a lifted pail.
The cows, too, are part of the scene, the condensation from their warm wreaths of breath falling
like dew on the hedges, their udders brimming like the pail of water, their blood like a river
flowing darkly through, bringing fertility, their bony haunches like boulders ballasting the
moment, balancing its fragility and delicacy with permanence and solidity.
Perhaps it needs the child to register and hold all this because the poet cannot open himself,
cannot jettison his knowledge of past and future, his knowledge that blood can be spilled as
easily as milk and run in rivers outside the body, that boulders in a river are dangerous, that
darkness is dangerous, that the moon is a fickle murderous goddess, that, as an earlier version
ended:
Any minute
A bat will fly out of a cats ear.
The poem as we have it holds all this at bay, submerges all darker knowledge which might
disturb the perfect harmony of man and nature the child experiences.
With no self-consciousness to close her, she points at the moon with an amazement the moon can
only reciprocate, like an artist whose work has come to life or perfectly reflects the life of its
creator. Sylvia Plath said of her poem Nick and the Candlestick: A mother nurses her baby son
by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the worlds ill, does
redeem her share of it. Full Moon and Little Frieda is without irony because, through his child,
Hughes is able to see the world with the eyes of unfallen vision. It is the first of his Songs of
Innocence. )