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Animal Poems #4
The Thought-Fox
All the richness of the wild is seen through the poet's eye. Here are poems from Hawk in the Rain, Wodwo, Wolfwatching, Lupercal and River as well as from Adam and the Sacred Nine, their juxtaposition highlighting the variety of the natural world and of Hughes's poetry about it.
Paperback
First published May 1, 1973
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About the author
Ted Hughes
383 books729 followersEdward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008, The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
He married fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England, in a tumultuous relationship. They had two children before separating in 1962 and Plath ended her own life in 1963.
He married fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England, in a tumultuous relationship. They had two children before separating in 1962 and Plath ended her own life in 1963.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 2, 2007
When the gnats dance at evening
Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,
Scrambling their crazy lexicon,
Shuffling their dumb Cabala,
Under leaf shadow
Leaves only leaves
Between them and the broad swipes of the sun
Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun
From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments
Dancing
Dancing
Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write
Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles
Everybody everybody else's yo-yo
Immense magnets fighting around a centre
Not writing and not fighting but singing
That the cycles of this Universe are no matter
That they are not afraid of the sun
That the one sun is too near
It blasts their song, which is of all the suns
That they are their own sun
Their own brimming over
At large in the nothing
Their wings blurring the blaze
Singing
That they are the nails
In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god
That they hear the wind suffering
Through the grass
And the evening tree suffering
The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries
And the long roads of dust
Dancing in the wind
The wind's dance, the death-dance, entering the
mountain
And the cow-dung villages huddling to dust
But not the gnats, their agility
Has outleapt that threshold
And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass
Dancing
Dancing
In the glove shadows of the sycamore
A dance never to be altered
A dance giving their bodies to be burned
And their mummy faces will never be used
Their little bearded faces
Weaving and bobbing on the nothing
Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken
And their feet dangling like the feet of victims
0 little Hasids
Ridden to death by your own bodies
Riding your bodies to death
You are the angels of the only heaven!
And God is an Almighty Gnat!
You are the greatest of all the galaxies!
My hands fly in the air, they are follies
My tongue hangs up in the leaves
My thoughts have crept into crannies
Your dancing
Your dancing
Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space
Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,
Scrambling their crazy lexicon,
Shuffling their dumb Cabala,
Under leaf shadow
Leaves only leaves
Between them and the broad swipes of the sun
Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun
From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments
Dancing
Dancing
Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write
Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles
Everybody everybody else's yo-yo
Immense magnets fighting around a centre
Not writing and not fighting but singing
That the cycles of this Universe are no matter
That they are not afraid of the sun
That the one sun is too near
It blasts their song, which is of all the suns
That they are their own sun
Their own brimming over
At large in the nothing
Their wings blurring the blaze
Singing
That they are the nails
In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god
That they hear the wind suffering
Through the grass
And the evening tree suffering
The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries
And the long roads of dust
Dancing in the wind
The wind's dance, the death-dance, entering the
mountain
And the cow-dung villages huddling to dust
But not the gnats, their agility
Has outleapt that threshold
And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass
Dancing
Dancing
In the glove shadows of the sycamore
A dance never to be altered
A dance giving their bodies to be burned
And their mummy faces will never be used
Their little bearded faces
Weaving and bobbing on the nothing
Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken
And their feet dangling like the feet of victims
0 little Hasids
Ridden to death by your own bodies
Riding your bodies to death
You are the angels of the only heaven!
And God is an Almighty Gnat!
You are the greatest of all the galaxies!
My hands fly in the air, they are follies
My tongue hangs up in the leaves
My thoughts have crept into crannies
Your dancing
Your dancing
Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space
February 5, 2026
The imagery of nature is of course where Hughes stands out and it's evocative.
November 18, 2021
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest;
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
After an intermission, the living metaphor moves into the poem:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s 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.
‘The Thought-Fox’ depicts, in a tortuous or slanted manner, the progression by which a poem gets written.
What a poet needs to write a poem is encouragement. He waits for the onrush of an idea through his brain.
And, obviously, he also needs isolation around him.
Solitude and stillness are, however, only causative circumstances. They constitute a favourable milieu, while the poem itself comes out of the poet’s head which has been invaded, as it were, by an inspiration or thought.
The thought or consideration takes shape in his head like a fox entering a shadowy forest and then coming out of it unexpectedly.
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 representation.
This was one of the dazzling poems in the volume called “The Hawk in the Rain”. What is significant about this poem, apart from its figurative statement of the process of poetic composition, is its imagery.
We have here a succession of images in the poem, from the first line to the last; and every image is a flamboyant one.
The opening line contains the subsequent image:
“I imagine this midnight moment’s forest.”
Here the poet imagines that he is sitting in a forest at midnight.
Then follow the images of the forlorn 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 recognizes something intruding upon his lonesomeness or privacy.
Next, a fox’s nose touches a twig and then a leaf.
The two eyes of the fox seem to be moving forward. The fox is leaving comprehensible footprints on the snow in the forest.
The imagery continues with the eye of the fox “brilliantly, concentrated,” 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 totally out of place because eventually the poem written by its author would get printed.
Truth be told, the poem does not have much of an appeal for the average reader. The poem contains an abstract idea which the poet has tried to concretize.
Average readers, cannot comprehend why a thought should be personified as a fox. To the lay reader, a fox symbolizes 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 sweet talk to make the crow open its beak so that the piece of cheese might fall from the beak for the fox to seize 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 outstanding because of its felicity of word and phrase.
The only noteworthy quality of this poem is its imagery.
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
After an intermission, the living metaphor moves into the poem:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s 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.
‘The Thought-Fox’ depicts, in a tortuous or slanted manner, the progression by which a poem gets written.
What a poet needs to write a poem is encouragement. He waits for the onrush of an idea through his brain.
And, obviously, he also needs isolation around him.
Solitude and stillness are, however, only causative circumstances. They constitute a favourable milieu, while the poem itself comes out of the poet’s head which has been invaded, as it were, by an inspiration or thought.
The thought or consideration takes shape in his head like a fox entering a shadowy forest and then coming out of it unexpectedly.
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 representation.
This was one of the dazzling poems in the volume called “The Hawk in the Rain”. What is significant about this poem, apart from its figurative statement of the process of poetic composition, is its imagery.
We have here a succession of images in the poem, from the first line to the last; and every image is a flamboyant one.
The opening line contains the subsequent image:
“I imagine this midnight moment’s forest.”
Here the poet imagines that he is sitting in a forest at midnight.
Then follow the images of the forlorn 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 recognizes something intruding upon his lonesomeness or privacy.
Next, a fox’s nose touches a twig and then a leaf.
The two eyes of the fox seem to be moving forward. The fox is leaving comprehensible footprints on the snow in the forest.
The imagery continues with the eye of the fox “brilliantly, concentrated,” 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 totally out of place because eventually the poem written by its author would get printed.
Truth be told, the poem does not have much of an appeal for the average reader. The poem contains an abstract idea which the poet has tried to concretize.
Average readers, cannot comprehend why a thought should be personified as a fox. To the lay reader, a fox symbolizes 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 sweet talk to make the crow open its beak so that the piece of cheese might fall from the beak for the fox to seize 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 outstanding because of its felicity of word and phrase.
The only noteworthy quality of this poem is its imagery.
November 30, 2022
I had a hard copy and audio book of this and read along with the Ted Hughes's reading of his own poetry. I recommend it as a method of reading poetry, especially if you have access to a good poetry library. His voice is posh northern. Clipped. Stone sharp.
There are some poems from The Crow, which is another collection of his that I've read/heard. Those poems made more sense this time.
I like the way Ted Hughes uses words. Sometimes it feels like a word has been chosen and placed with the strategic certainty of a chess grandmaster putting a piece on the square before he announced mate. Sometimes I think he has hypnotised himself with the sound and rhythm of the words and the meaning gets buried behind creeping barrage of sound. It is sound and fury signifying...something. I can't always identify that something. But that is one of the joys of poetry. The unravelling of meaning. Sometimes I can't do it. On a first or second or third read. And I give up and move on and then later - click - I realise I understand what I read.
I think this second Ted Hughes collection I've read and I've had similar joy and pain with both of them. I'm now going to let them bubble under in the back of my brain for a while, but as I do I can still hear his voice faintly echoing in the distance.
There are some poems from The Crow, which is another collection of his that I've read/heard. Those poems made more sense this time.
I like the way Ted Hughes uses words. Sometimes it feels like a word has been chosen and placed with the strategic certainty of a chess grandmaster putting a piece on the square before he announced mate. Sometimes I think he has hypnotised himself with the sound and rhythm of the words and the meaning gets buried behind creeping barrage of sound. It is sound and fury signifying...something. I can't always identify that something. But that is one of the joys of poetry. The unravelling of meaning. Sometimes I can't do it. On a first or second or third read. And I give up and move on and then later - click - I realise I understand what I read.
I think this second Ted Hughes collection I've read and I've had similar joy and pain with both of them. I'm now going to let them bubble under in the back of my brain for a while, but as I do I can still hear his voice faintly echoing in the distance.
January 18, 2020
4.3 stars!
Gorgeous nature poetry...
“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, The Thought-Fox
Gorgeous nature poetry...
“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, The Thought-Fox
March 18, 2019
If you just saw the cover, you may expect some quirky, cosy poetry. Some of it is. The most of it is dark, brittle, godlessly death centred but ultimately beautiful in the sharpness of words and images. Nevertheless, powerfull stuff.
My favourites in this poem are 'And Owl' and the one about otters, with a special mention to the poem about the rat painfully dying in a trap before entering into a dark oblivion, as the writer compares it's agony and death screeches to a humans fruitless search for god. Cheery stuff.
My favourites in this poem are 'And Owl' and the one about otters, with a special mention to the poem about the rat painfully dying in a trap before entering into a dark oblivion, as the writer compares it's agony and death screeches to a humans fruitless search for god. Cheery stuff.
November 14, 2019
Always brilliant.
May 4, 2021
What I got from this collection is that nature is dark and violent. There were probably many more layers, but I did not get to them.
March 14, 2022
Wildlife poetry just isn't for me :(
June 22, 2024
I am biased. I dont think many poets can do what he did.
He is amazing.
I read it in one go.
Poems like Whale, otter, tiger and thought fox will always stay in my mind
He is amazing.
I read it in one go.
Poems like Whale, otter, tiger and thought fox will always stay in my mind
March 13, 2024
Blood, death, threat. Even when he's describing flowers, Hughes reaches for starkly bleak imagery. The poems are powerful and unforgettable, but harshly realistic in a disturbing way. Telephone and the one about dead lambs stand out.
May 10, 2014
Brilliant
May 14, 2015
Some of these are brilliant. He has a great style and voice, almost mesmerising at times. Some of the poems aren't so good though, therefore it isn't a five star.
December 28, 2018
I think this has made me change my mind on Ted Hughes.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews