By: Ted Hughes

Index

1.-INTRODUCTION:

2.-ANALYSIS:

3.-CONCLUSION:

4.-BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1.-INTRODUCTION:

In this four and last individual paper I am going to analyse the figure of Ted Hughes (1930-1998) who was an eminent English poet who led a resurgence of English poetic innovation starting in the late 1950s. Then Hughes became especially known for his graphic depiction of struggle and conflict. And later, in 1985, he was named poet laureate.[1]

Hughes' poetry established his pre-eminence in English poetry at an early stage and indicated a resurgence of English poetic innovation after a long period of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish dominance.

Many of his early poems especially shared a more general post-modernist concern with struggle and the violent affirmation of identity, and some more traditionally-minded critics have seen them as rather alien to the English spirit of harmony and compromise. [2]

I have focussed my attention in one of his poems called “Thought-Fox” principally because Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals.

2.-ANALYSIS:

The ‘Thought-Fox’ has often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realised and artistically satisfying of the poems in Ted Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain

THE THOUGHT-FOX[3]

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.
.

I will become saying that ‘The thought-fox’ is a poem about writing a poem. Its external action takes place in a room late at night where the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is starless, silent, and totally black. But the poet senses a presence which disturbs him:

In the two first paragraphs we can observe how the author is describing the environment, a forest in the midnight; he also has in front of him a blank page where his fingers move, and as he says Through the window I see no star. But inside that completely darkness we can find the loneliness.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near

Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness.

The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night, for the night is itself a metaphor for the deeper and more intimate darkness of the poet’s imagination in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines; it is not seen but felt – frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet’s task is to coax it out of formlessness and into fuller consciousness by the sensitivity of his language. The remote stirrings of the poem are compared to the stirrings of an animal – a fox, whose body is invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously through the dark undergrowth: [4]

But in the middle of that darkness the author finds something that corrupts his loneliness, it is a fox. (Verses 9 and 10)

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

The idea of the delicate dark snow evokes the physical reality of the fox’s nose which is itself cold, dark and damp, twitching moistly and gently against twig and leaf. In this way the first feature of the fox is mysteriously defined and its wet black nose is nervously alive in the darkness.

Gradually the fox’s eyes appear out of the same formlessness, leading the shadowy movement of its body as it comes closer: (Verses 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15) 4

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.

The tracks which the fox leaves in the snow are themselves duplicated by the sounds and rhythm of the line ‘Sets neat prints into the snow’. (Verse 13)

The first three short words of this line are internal half-rhymes, and these words press down gently but distinctly into the soft open vowel of ‘snow’. The fox’s body remains indistinct, a silhouette against the snow. But the phrase ‘lame shadow’ itself evokes a more precise image of the fox, as it freezes alertly in its tracks, holding one front-paw in mid-air, and then moves off again like a limping animal. At the end of the stanza the words ‘bold to come’ (Verse 16) are left suspended – as though the fox is pausing at the outer edge of some trees. The gap between the stanzas is itself the clearing which the fox, after hesitating warily, suddenly shoots across: ‘Of a body that is bold to come / Across clearings.’ (Verses 16 and 17) 4

The fox has scented safety. It has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet (and upon the reader). In this part of the poem we can see what colour its eyes are: (Verses 17, 18, 19 and 20)

an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business. ..

It is so close now that its two eyes have merged into a single green glare which grows wider and wider as the fox comes nearer, its eyes heading directly towards ours: ‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head’. (Verses 21 and 22) 4

If we are following the full poem the ‘visual logic’ of the poem makes us to imagine the fox actually jumping through the eyes of the poet – with whom us (the readers of the poem) is inevitably drawn into identification.

That means that the fox enters the lair of the head as it would enter its own lair, bringing with it the hot, sensual, animal reek of its body and all the excitement and power of the achieved vision.

The fox is no longer a formless stirring somewhere in the dark depths of the bodily imagination; it has been coaxed out of the darkness and into full consciousness. And all this has been done purely by the imagination. For in reality there is no fox at all, and outside, in the external darkness, nothing has changed: ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.’ (Verses 23 and 24) 4

The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox.

For Hughes’s fox has none of the freedom of an animal. It cannot get up from the page and walk off to nuzzle its young cubs or do foxy things behind the poet’s back. It cannot even die in its own mortal, animal way.

Hughes in ‘The thought-fox’ unconsciously inflicts the violence of an art upon animal sensuality in a passionate but conflict-ridden attempt to incorporate it into his own rationalist identity. 4

The very accuracy of the evocation of the fox seems at times almost fussily obsessive. The studied and beautifully ‘final’ nature of the poem indicates that we are not in the presence of any untrained spontaneity, any primitive or naive vision. It might be suggested that the sensibility behind Hughes’s poem is more that of an intellectual – an intellectual who, in rebellion against his own ascetic rationalism, feels himself driven to hunt down and capture an element of his own sensual and intuitive identity which he does not securely possess. 4

The conflict of sensibility which Hughes unconsciously dramatises in ‘The thought-fox’ runs through all his poetry. On the one hand there is in his work an extraordinary sensuous and sensual generosity which coexists with a sense of abundance and a capacity for expressing tenderness which are unusual in contemporary poetry. 4

In ‘The thought-fox’ itself this conflict of sensibility appears in such an attenuated or suppressed form that it is by no means the most striking feature of the poem. But, as I have tried to show, the conflict may still be discerned. It is present above all in the tension between the extraordinary sensuous delicacy of the image which Hughes uses to describe the fox’s nose and the predatory, impulse which seems to underlie the poem – an impulse to which Hughes has himself drawn attention by repeatedly comparing the act of poetic creation to the process of capturing or killing small animals. Indeed it might be suggested that the last stanza of the poem records what is, in effect, a ritual of tough ‘manly’ posturing. For in it the poet might be seen as playing a kind of imaginative game in which he attempts to outstare the fox – looking straight into its eyes as it comes closer and closer and refusing to move, refusing to flinch, refusing to show any sign of ‘feminine’ weakness. The fox itself does not flinch or deviate from its course. 4

Now I am going to do an analysis of the rhythm, sonnets and the stanzas.

Their rhyme’s structure followed is A / A / B / B in the first stanza but in the second stanza it changes to C / C / D / D.

Talking about the verb tense I can say that the author uses the present tense because it is a recent event. And the metaphors are clearly noticeable during the poem because, if I have understand correctly the poem, the poem is itself a metaphor. The fox is all the poem itself.

In the first two lines of this passage the rhythm of the verse is broken by the punctuation and the line-endings, while at the same time what seemed the predictable course of the rhyme-scheme is deliberately departed from. Both rhythmically and phonetically the verse thus mimes the nervous, unpredictable movement of the fox as it delicately steps forward.

Arriving to the fifth stanza of the poem the hesitant rhythm of that single sentence which is prolonged over five stanzas breaks into a final and deliberate run.

As I see the last stanza of the poem clearly communicates the excitement of poetic creation, it seems at the same time to express an almost predatory thrill; it is as though the fox has successfully been lured into a hunter’s trap.

To sum up the main characteristics of Hughes poetry I want to show and compare him with one of the first periods that I have study this year. This is that there is an alternative to the Romantic view of Hughes’s poetic personality. That is to see Hughes’s poetry as essentially the poetry of an intellectual, an intellectual who is subject to the rigours of ‘puritanical rationalism’ just as much as any other intellectual but who, instead of submitting to those rigours, fights against them with that stubborn and intransigent resolution which belongs only to the puritan soul.

But Hughes is always talking of modern civilisation as consisting in ‘mental disintegration’.

And for that reason I want to show something that Ted Hughes has written, ‘that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them’. [5]

3.-CONCLUSION:

In this essay I have set out to use what might be regarded as a very ordinary analysis of a poem in order to focus attention on some aspects of Hughes’s poetry. My particular interest is Hughes’s poetic vision.

Finally I have to say that Hughes’s vision have opened in me like a window through which I could know that poetry is always there but we do not know how many things a poem can give to us every time that we read it. Because it depends on the moment we read a poem, where we read a poem, or even if we know the environmental in which a poem was written we can improve ourselves by different ways.

4.-BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1 http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/under85.htm

Ted Hughes: An Introduction

Visited on 8^th May 2007.

2 http://www.bookrags.com/biography/ted-hughes/