Ted Hughes deals in his poetry with nature and the members in nature. But, unlike romantics, he depicts with admiration, the power and vitality of nature. In his poetry, he included birds, animals, landscape etc. But he never admired their beauty. On the other hand, he admired their brute valor. Therefore, it is right to call him a poet of hot blood and a poet of life led at the level of impulses and instincts.
According to Ted Hughes, each and every being in nature has a brutal power, which helps it to survive. It is there in human beings also. But civilized men keeps suppressed his natural instincts. It results in the lack of his link with nature. In his poem, ‘The Thought Fox’, he represents his wandering thoughts or ideas as a fox does in a forest.
The theme of ‘Thought Fox’ is poetic composition. The time referred in the poem is midnight. The poet can hear the tick tick of the clock. Suddenly, he becomes conscious of something else too that is active there… something, which disturbs him. He has a blank page in front. Out, through the window, he finds a starless sky. He checks very keenly, what else is active.
The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night. The night, here becomes a metaphor. It indicates the intimate darkness of the poets imagination, in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines. It is frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet coaxes 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 – fox. Its body is invisible. It moves forward nervously through the dark undergrowth.
The poet’s perception encounters with the fox. Its nose touches every twig and leaf. The footprints in the pure due are visible. Among the trees, the fox’s shadow precedes its body. Slowly it reaches an open space, and then, the animal comes into direct view. Now it is no longer nervous and vulnerable. It is no longer formless. It has been brought out of the darkness, into full consciousness.
The fox is now at home in the lair of the head. It is safe from extinction. It is caught, trapped forever on the page. All what happened are purely in imagination. In reality, there is no fox at all. Outside, in the eternal darkness, nothing has changed.
“The window is starless still; the clock ticks
The page is printed”
The fox is vividly and immediately alive. It has been printed so artfully upon the page. It now becomes evident that the fox is the poem. “Every time anyone reads the poem, the fox will get up somewhere in the darkness and come walking towards them”. The rhythm suggests the wary movements of the fox. The language is mixed up with a primitive roughness.
According to Ted Hughes, each and every being in nature has a brutal power, which helps it to survive. It is there in human beings also. But civilized men keeps suppressed his natural instincts. It results in the lack of his link with nature. In his poem, ‘The Thought Fox’, he represents his wandering thoughts or ideas as a fox does in a forest.
The theme of ‘Thought Fox’ is poetic composition. The time referred in the poem is midnight. The poet can hear the tick tick of the clock. Suddenly, he becomes conscious of something else too that is active there… something, which disturbs him. He has a blank page in front. Out, through the window, he finds a starless sky. He checks very keenly, what else is active.
The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night. The night, here becomes a metaphor. It indicates the intimate darkness of the poets imagination, in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines. It is frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet coaxes 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 – fox. Its body is invisible. It moves forward nervously through the dark undergrowth.
The poet’s perception encounters with the fox. Its nose touches every twig and leaf. The footprints in the pure due are visible. Among the trees, the fox’s shadow precedes its body. Slowly it reaches an open space, and then, the animal comes into direct view. Now it is no longer nervous and vulnerable. It is no longer formless. It has been brought out of the darkness, into full consciousness.
The fox is now at home in the lair of the head. It is safe from extinction. It is caught, trapped forever on the page. All what happened are purely in imagination. In reality, there is no fox at all. Outside, in the eternal darkness, nothing has changed.
“The window is starless still; the clock ticks
The page is printed”
The fox is vividly and immediately alive. It has been printed so artfully upon the page. It now becomes evident that the fox is the poem. “Every time anyone reads the poem, the fox will get up somewhere in the darkness and come walking towards them”. The rhythm suggests the wary movements of the fox. The language is mixed up with a primitive roughness.
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