Thought Fox

Ted Hughes

Dr Ratheesh.P
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Govt. Arts & Science College for Women, Malappuram
  Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
 English Poet, Translator (Ovid & Aeschylus), children’s writer and editor
 Was the Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death
 Married the American poet Sylvia Plath
 Major Publications:
 The Hawk in the Rain (1957)
 Lupercal (1960)
 Wodo (1967)
 Crow (1970)
 Moortown Diary (1989)
 Selected Poems 1957- 1981(1982)
 Wolfwatching (1989), The Birthday Letters (1998)
 Selected Poems 1957-1998 (2002)
 Letters of Ted Hughes (2008)
 The Iron Man (Children’s Book)
 Collected Poems (2003)
 The Rattle Bag (1982)
 The School Bag (1997) edited with Seamus
Heaney
 The Thought Fox

 The Hawk in the Rain (1957) – won Somerset Maugham

Award
 “…most completely realised and artistically satisfying
poem”
 Its an ars poetica - a poem about writing a poem that
uses the metaphor of a thought as a fox
 A meta-poem- one of the most celebrated account of the
act of writing poetry
  The Thought Fox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVX36zmqz4U
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 withing 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 print 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 imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
 “…midnights moments forest”- metaphor of the
imagination of the poet-
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though Deeper withing 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 print 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
 Themes
 The Act of Writing
 Nature
Symbols
 The Fox
 Stars
 The Forest
  Poetic Devices
Alliteration, Simile, Metaphor, Transferred Epithet, Personification,
Repetition,,, enjambment etc.
Alliteration:
It is a literary device in which a series of words begin with the same
consonant sound.
“Midnight moment”-
“sudden sharp hot stink of fox”-
“starless still”-
Simile:
Cold,…leaf;- reversed simile-
Metaphor:
Starless Night-
“Sets…snow”-
Transferred Epithet/ Personification :
“Clock’s Loneliness”-
 Enjambment:
 the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond
the end of a line or stanza. Here the meaning runs over
from one poetic line to the next, without terminal
punctuation
“Coming about…of fox”-
Tone of the Poem
 Suspense and mystery
Thank you