Explore the poem

The “Thought Fox” is a poem about the creative process and specifically about writing a poem. The first stanza locating the poem late at night in the writer’s study suggests near silence through gentle, hushed “m” sounds whilst if you have read William Blake’s poem ‘Tyger’ you may hear echoes of Blake’s poem in the first line.

The night is starless and black but something is stirring. Is the darkness of the night a metaphor for the poet’s imagination where an idea is beginning to develop? The tentative emerging of the unwritten poem is compared to the cautious movements of a fox feeling its way through leaves and twigs. Notice how punctuation and repetition capture the movements of the fox in the third stanza. The internal half rhymes at the beginning of the fourth stanza describing the fox’s paw prints lead in to the soft open vowel of “snow”. Where else do you see Hughes using sounds and metaphors in the poem to make connections between the fox and poetic inspiration?

Consider the final stanza and the sudden climax of the poem when the fox enters “…the dark hole of the head.” Is the fox entering the lair of the head as it would enter its own lair? How do you respond to the dramatic, almost magical ending of the poem? “The page is printed.”

About Ted Hughes

A former Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes was one of the most influential English poets of the twentieth century. While at Cambridge University he met and later married the American scholar and poet Sylvia Plath. For many years after Plath’s suicide Hughes remained virtually silent about her, despite accusations that he had contributed to his wife’s tragic death. Shortly before he died Hughes surprised the literary world by publishing Birthday Letters, a collection of poems about his relationship with Plath.

Earlier in his career Hughes wrote nature poetry, but his poems about his native Yorkshire landscape and its animals were very different from the pastoral conventions of English poetry; charged with the intensity of the mythic, his work was rawer, darker and more violent. Drawing on Anglo-Saxon, the language Hughes used often has a rough-hewn physicality that gives his verse a monumental quality.