The Thought Fox, by Ted Hughes
"The Thought-Fox" is a poem about writing a poem, it explicates the nature of literary inspiration and literary creation. The action of the poem takes place at midnight where the poet is sitting alone at his desk accompanied only by the ticking of the clock. The image evoked is one of quiet and solitude where the poet is cut off from the world ready to be transported by his literary imagination. The poet’s imagination is like a presence which disturbs the stillness of the night, the stillness of things yet unknown, and is depicted as if creeping silently upon the poet evoking a sense of stealth:
"Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:"
The night itself is of course a metaphor for the more intimate darkness of the poet’s imagination and creative inspiration that creeps silently and without warning upon the poet, “cold, delicately as the dark snow”. The mysterious nature of the stirrings of imagination is compared to the indistinct shadow of a fox that moves stealthily in the darkness of the night. The shadow in the night suggests the amorphousness and abstract nature of literary inspiration that sneaks in like a fox mysteriously and without warning. The fox seems to materialise out of the formlessness of the snow, it is a faint shadow against the snow that will take the form “of a body that is bold to come”. The image of the fox taking shape is thus equivalent to the process of creative imagination, which slowly forms itself in the dark recesses of the poet’s mind to produce a work of art:
"Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head."
The fox penetrates the deep and intimate darkness of the poet’s mind to evoke the moment when the desirable vision is attained. The poem ends as it has begun, turning in full circle.
"The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed."
The fox is the process of artistic creation that is almost a mystical experience forming itself out of nothingness through the poetic imagination. “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”. The fox, therefore, also seems to represent the epiphanies of reading that embrace the reader when he becomes engrossed in reading a work of art.
Ted Hughes’s "The Thought Fox" enacts the solitude that surrounds a work of art. In Hughes’s poem, we perceive that the last line also has a sort of fatalism and a notion of wistfulness. For although, the last stanza expresses the excitement of poetic creation, the matter-of-factness of the last line seems to plunge us back to reality evoking an almost palpable sense of relief that the poem is over. The blank white page full of potentiality for poetry is now printed and the writer knows that the poem that has been written is always a pale reflection of the poem or poems that could have been written.
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