The Thought-Fox

Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches 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 lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The windowis starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

The poem « the thought-fox » was published in 1957 in Ted Hughes' first collection of poems « The Hawk in the Rain ».
The « Thought-fox » has often been acknowledge as one of the most completely realised and artistically satisfying of the poems in this collection.
I was ignorant of Ted Hughes work before I had to carry out research for this interview.
It appeard that Ted Hughes was one of the most honored and respected poet of the 2Oth century.
I found out that Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in Nature in particular in the innocent savagery of animals and that animals often serve as metaphore.
Those two features of Ted Hughes' poems are, I think, particularly well illustrated in « the thought-fox ».

« The thought-fox » is a poem about writing a poem, about the nature of inspiration, the moment of creation.
Its external action takes place in a room, late at night where the poet is sitting alone at his desk.

I imagine this midnight moment's forest
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move

The image evoked here is one of quiet and solitude, the poet is cut off