Thoughtful Mr Fox. Wider Reading (Poetry) 8: The Thought-Fox

Ted Hughes was an English poet, born in 1930. He was the Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998, and was married to the American poet Sylvia Plath until her famous oven-suicide. Many people, including numerous feminists, claim he was responsible for her death, though Hughes himself refused to take any part in the debate.

"The Thought-Fox" is the developed offspring of Hughes' earlier work, much of which is rooted in nature and concerns the innocent savagery of animals. The poem is essentially a poem about writing a poem. The fox appears in the clearing like an idea entering the head, and its footprints left in the snow appear as writing on the page. At first it is blurred and undefined, like an idea, and the writer's task is to coax it out and develop it. The imagery of this poem causes the reader to picture the fox actually jumping through the eyes of the poet. This means that the fox enters the cavern of the mind as it would enter its own lair, bringing with it the hot animal smell of its body and all the excitement and triumph of the achieved vision.

The primary identity struggle here is the individual struggle of the writer, as his identity seems to be second to poetic inspiration, which fills the head as effectively as snow fills a clearing. The "fox" described within appears to have its own intuitive, sensual identity which the writer himself cannot possess.

The Thought-Fox Identity Quotations