"THE THOUGHT-FOX" by Ted 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 ThoughtFox 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 poultrykeeper 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 businessfunctioning 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 mind's 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 fox's 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."