The Thought Fox�Ted Hughes

Dr Mamta

For BA Sem V English Compulsory

The poet

• Ted Hughes was an English poet and children's writer born in August 1930.
• He was Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.
• Born in Yorkshire, Ted Hughes was the son of an avid countryman who fought in the war as part of the Lancashire Fusiliers.
• He had a great interest in animals, which feature heavily in a lot of his poems, and went so far as to work at a zoo after University.

Impact of the World Wars

• After the war, Britain was an economic and cultural mess.
• The Second World War had pushed it into crushing debt and that, combined with the moral-lowering problem of losing their colonies, led to fewer jobs, and thus to poets whose body of work dealt primarily with the issues of loss of faith and hopelessness.
• Ted Hughes, who wrote ‘The Thought-Fox’, was one of those poets.

Personal life

• Ted Hughes was married to Sylvia Plath until his affair in 1962.
• Only a year later, Sylvia Plath would take her own life, leaving behind feminist fans to hound Hughes after her death, and chisel his name off her headstone.

The beginning

• ‘The Thought-Fox’ starts on a silent, clear night. The poet, sitting alone at his desk, attempts to write, but has no luck with it. He senses a second presence – ‘something more near / though deeper within darkness / is entering the loneliness’.
• Here, the night itself is symbolic of the depths of imagination, standing for the idea of dormant genius, and the muse, which typically visits at unorthodox hours.
• The poet is alone at night, laboring over his poem, when he feels the stirrings of an idea.

The Fox- An Idea

• The idea itself is symbolized by the fox’s presence, and at first, it is not clear what the idea is, to the poet.
• As Hughes writes, ‘a fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;’ showing, through the fragmented image of the fox’s nose, that it is only a very basic view of an idea, not one stamped out clearly.
• The fox is shrouded in darkness; only the pinnacle of it can be seen by the watchful poet, and likewise, the muse visits but only leaves him with a fragment of an image to build into a poem.
• The fox remains half-hidden and elusive throughout the entire poem; the idea, likewise, remains half-hidden to the poet, allowing him only wisps of imagery to contend with.

The image of fox

• The symbol of the fox to stand for the idea of the muse: fleeting and quick, it haunts the poet-writer, disturbing his quiet night.
• There is a certain softness about the way that Hughes writes his imagery: his penchant for mythical language comes through in spades as he talks about the ‘dark snow’, the ‘eye / a widening deepening greenness’.
• Hughes has an almost cinematic quality of imagery – one can very easily imagine the quiet night, the poet at his desk, the fox touching a leaf in a separate shot – and he uses this to further evoke the idea of the playful muse, sneaking in, and sneaking out of the poet’s grasp.

The Poem and the Fox

• Gradually, the fox emerges out of formlessness; a ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, thus showing that the poet has reached the peak of his creative ability, and has managed to write the poem that has tantalized him throughout the night.
• The fox is suddenly visible, the idea is suddenly within the poet’s mind, and has been immortalized on the page. The poem and the fox exist as one entity.

Tracing the Pattern of the Poem

• Ted Hughes writes with a pace that heightens the anticipation. At the start, only the fox’s nose is visible.
• Then two eyes. The choppy punctuation shows the hesitancy of the fox/idea, the delicate way that Ted Hughes writes about the fox leaving prints in the snow is further emphasized by the sharp, short phrase ‘sets neat prints in 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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Inspiration vs Loneliness

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• The speaker discusses the process of writing, drawing particular attention to the loneliness of the creative act.
• One’s own emotions are projected into the environment. He, in this spirit, describes the clock as lonely as well as the darkness of the midnight forest which has sprung up in his imagination.
• Loneliness, then, can be understood as a metaphor for the absence of creative inspiration. Thus, the fox, the other living entity in the poem, brings the promise of alleviating the speaker’s solitude and charging him with the inspiration he needs to create his poem.

Creative Focus

• The metaphorical scene Hughes depicts in the poem emphasizes the importance of focus in the artistic process.
• The scene is presented as one the speaker has been through before: he refers in the first line to “this” midnight’s forest as though there have been many others.
• He returns to this forest of his imagination again and again, awaiting the inspiration brought by the fox.
• He is absolutely focused on the fox, each of the animal’s movements, keeping incredibly still himself so as not to frighten the fox away. He is aware only of its presence at first, and then he sees its movement, and eventually he can even smell it.
• He is absolutely focused only on this animal. By the end of the poem, it is clear that this degree of focus is necessary to achieve the desired goal: “The page. . . printed.”

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