The Thought Fox -- Ted Hughes

(Poem #98) The Thought Fox 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 window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed. -- Ted Hughes

Somehow, the adjective that comes to mind most often when I read Ted
Hughes is 'clean' - I think of his poetry as being very concise, very
elegantly crafted, incisive, as glittering and sharp and dangerous as a
scalpel... there's a latent violence about his work that, barely
restrained, imbues the whole with a raw, primal power.

And yet... poems like 'Hawk Roosting' (Minstrels, Poem #42) may be as
harsh as the surgeon's knife, but antiseptic they never are. There's a
colour and passion that fire Hughes' images; his world of 'Nature, red
in tooth and claw' is at once both more earthy and more 'real' than
those of the Movement poets who were his contemporaries; their works
seem pallid and strained in comparison.

thomas.

"'The Thought Fox' is a poem about composing poetry, or rather, about
being visited by the muse. Appropriately enough, in Hughes' case, the
muse is an animal, a fox. Hughes has said that this was the first animal
poem he wrote."
    -- George Macbeth

Ted Hughes died last year, at the age of 68. Some extracts from his
obituary in the Times:

"It has been said that all great works of literature either found a new
style or dissolve an old one; that they are, in other words, special
cases. The poetry of Ted Hughes is such a special case; its forcefulness
and animal vitality injected new life into English poetry. He will be
remembered most particularly for the strength of his early work, and for
his final, remarkable two books.

The appointment of Hughes as Poet Laureate in succession to John
Betjeman in 1984 signalled not just a new generation, but a change of
outlook. A post that had for more than a century been filled by
Establishment men mostly with mellow voices - Betjeman, Day-Lewis,
Masefield, Bridges, the lamentable Alfred Austin, Tennyson - was
suddenly occupied by one of the fiercest, most critical and
uncompromising of writers, who seemed most unlikely to be able to
provide verses for state occasions.

Laureate poems were never his forte, but it was a chore which he
dutifully carried out. He much preferred to send private poems, not for
publication, to the Queen Mother, with whom he often stayed in Scotland
and shared a passion for fishing, and also to other members of the Royal
Family. This reticence was typical of Hughes, always preferring to
perform in a private and a modest manner. "The whisper is always louder
than the shout," he would tell friends when asked if he would like to
comment on his work. He preferred to let it stand on its own.

Yet Hughes was perhaps the most widely read serious poet of his time.
His early work - The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Crow - was immediately
acclaimed, as were two books in the late 1990s, a free adaptation of
Ovid, and his verse memoir of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, Birthday
Letters. He was always a prodigious poet, as well as producing
children's books (including The Iron Man, now recognised as a classic),
anthologies and criticism. Both his great poetic triumphs and his
failures stemmed from uncompromising self-reliance.

His poem The Thought Fox contained what became one of Hughes's most
famous images, an emblem of the ferocity of his own poetry: an idea
entering the head with the violence of an animal, the "sudden sharp hot
stink of fox". These rapturous encounters with nature's claws and teeth
showed Hughes to be the finest English nature poet of his generation. "

You can read the complete obit at
[broken link] http://www.sunday-times.co.uk:80/news/pages/tim/98/10/30/timobiobi02002.html?1045266

For a more detailed biography, visit
[broken link] http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~angl/hughes/biobiblio.htm