Metapoesi og ræven som metafor i Ted Hughes' 'The Thought-Fox'

Metapoetry and the Use of a Fox as a Metaphor for the Poet’s Imagination in Ted Hughes’ “The Thought-Fox”

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is well known for his nature and animal poems. In a world where “[modern man’s] self has come to be divided between his natural instincts and cultural ego” (Madhukumar 391), Hughes uses nature and animals to get rid of this division. In “The Thought-Fox” he uses the metaphor of a fox coming into view to represent the thought process of a writer struggling to find inspiration to write a poem, and that same writer eventually stumbling upon it. In this essay I am going to explain why the fox is a helpful metaphor for this search for inspiration and how this metaphor emphasises the metapoetic aspects of the poem.

The poem starts with the speaker sitting alone in their room, nothing but “the clock’s loneliness” and a “blank page” keeping them company (3-4). The mention of the blank page could be the speaker talking about their mind: it is empty, and the speaker is desperately waiting for a thought to enter it. “[Seeing] no star” also alludes to the speaker’s as of yet empty mind (5). However, the speaker senses something else is alive. This feeling of something more grows in the second stanza. The speaker feels a thought, something bigger, entering his surroundings and therefore breaking the loneliness. The thought is “more near [but still] within darkness” which means a thought is beginning to form, but is not yet tangible (6-7). It is not until the third stanza that the fox enters the poem. Where before the “something” the speaker referred to was nothing but a vague feeling, the speaker is now talking about a concrete thing. The fox is the physical representation of the thought becoming bigger, something the speaker can work with. The fox is being introduced slowly. The slowness with which the fox enters the mind of the speaker is emphasised at the end of the third stanza when the speaker repeats the word “now” four times, expressing the careful steps the fox takes forward. These careful steps are “neat prints into the snow” (13). The snow could possibly be a metaphor for the blankness of the paper in front of the speaker in the first stanza, meaning the fox’s prints in the snow are a metaphor for words being put on a page.