The Thought Fox, Ted Hughes

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest: 

Something else is alive 

Beside 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 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.

In this poem, written in 1957, Ted Hughes writes self-reflexively about the process that occurs during both poetry making and poetry reading. He displays a self-consciousness that refers to the role of imagination in the creating and reading of his poem – where he seeks to break down our perception of what is ‘real’, and what is imagined within written text. Throughout the poem, Hughes alludes to a sense of reality. This is an attempt to make his own poetic persona seem tangible, and he repeatedly references naturalistic and specific detail such as ‘the clock’ and ‘this blank page where my fingers move’. This verifies a present tense, and locates Hughes as a vital, physical presence within the text, whilst crucially acknowledging his own existence. This is juxtaposed by the following lines which seek to declare the essential power of imagination. He slowly turns the shadowy other presence – the ‘something more near’, the ‘something else alive’ - into a fully formed, fully articulated signifier of a fox. We can pinpoint the moment at which the fox appears in Hughes’ imagination – ‘A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf/ Two eyes serve a moment, that now/ And now again, and now, and now/ Sets neat prints into the snow’. It is the repetition of ‘now’ that is key to this stanza, an adverb which reveals Hughes’ attempt to trap the moment of the fox’s mental conception into the physical lines of the text. The subsequent sensory description of the animal – ‘a lame/ Shadow lags by stump and in hollow’, ‘an eye/ A widening deepening greenness’, ‘a sudden sharp hot stink’ works to break down the established boundary between imaginary and physical existence. Hughes is asking us to imagine, really imagine a fox, but goes beyond the mere testing of our mental faculties by also inburing his 2-dimensional signifier with sensory desciptors. By doing so, he draws attention to the process that occurs between poet, poem, and reader and the fact that written symbols can only do so much to describe before reader must meet the text and take over the cultivation of meaning. The poem is a paradox; where Hughes is and isn’t the all-powerful creator of textual content. He hands responsibility over to his reader to participate in the making of the poem, and he acknowledges that the act of reading is not a straightforward negotiation between sender and receiver. Instead, suggests Hughes, the reader anticipates and creates his own interactions – we are guided by Hughes into imagining a fox, but ultimately we must create it, modify it, complete it, for ourselves.

This idea is critical to one element of my doctoral thesis since it articulates the complex gap between physical marks on the page and the process of imagination that occurs in the reader’s mind. The Thought Fox is a poem which attempts to pinpoint the moment at which the recognised shape of letters becomes transformed into a fully functioning mental picture. My thesis, in part seeks to analyse this moment in more detail, by investigating the various ways in which artists, writers, poets and illustrators have used this interplay between text and image to achieve a wide variety of artistic and intellectural results.

What I find so remarkable about Hughes’ poem is his insight that nothing that we perceive as ‘natural’ is free from semiotic baggage. A traditional reading of his poem might surmise that he is a naturalist/existentialist writing metaphorically about an fox, but I argue his wry analysis of the way that his own text is operating bears a close resemblance to semiotic criticism. Hughes seems to suggest that reality is dependent upon a system of signs; that nothing can exist outside of such cultural constructions. We ‘see’ the fox because a system allows us to read and interpret the textual signs (the letters, punctuation and spaces) that Hughes lays out. The play in the poem arises from the tension that exists between spontaneity and forecast – as new readers we are led to feel as though the conjuring up of the fox is somehow unique and fleetingly precious, when in fact the fox is an inevitable by-product of the signs already organised by Hughes. This relationship between signifier and signified is often taken for granted as being natural, which makes Hughes’s attention to the gap between the two all the more extraordinary. This supposition of ‘naturalness’ is one of the most common ideologies that semioticians seek to expose and eradicate. Semiotic analysts such as Jonathan Culler argue that taking this exchange between signifier and signified as being unmediated is like perceiving photography as being ‘a window on the world’. – a claim made by Roland Barthes in 1977 which has been widely contested since. Hughes works in opposition to this notion of naturalness by calling noisy attention to the process of mediation, as if he is unpicking the so-called ‘invisible editing’ we have come to expect from most forms of mass popular culture.