Literary Devices

Ted Hughes builds "The Thought Fox" on one extended metaphor, the thought as a fox, and supports it with vivid imagery for several senses, symbols such as the starless window, the clock and the blank page, sound devices such as alliteration and sibilance, and a structure of enjambed lines that moves like the fox itself.

This lesson analyses the literary devices of "The Thought Fox" and their effects. It explains the governing extended metaphor and the symbols that support it; the visual, tactile, olfactory and auditory imagery that makes the fox grow more vivid as it approaches; figures of speech such as simile, transferred epithet, paradox, synecdoche and pun; sound devices including alliteration, sibilance, assonance and repetition; and structural choices such as the six quatrains, the long enjambed sentence, caesura and the circular ending. Each device is located by stanza and linked to the poem's meaning.

Literary Devices in "The Thought Fox"

Hughes's poem is short, but almost every word does work on two levels at once: the literal level of a fox in a snowy wood, and the metaphorical level of a thought arriving in a writer's mind. The devices below are the tools that make this double vision possible.

The governing device: extended metaphor

The whole poem is an extended metaphor, sometimes called a conceit: the thought that becomes the poem is presented as a fox. The title joins the two halves of the comparison. Every stage of the fox's approach (its hesitant first steps, its bolder crossing of the clearings and its sudden arrival) corresponds to a stage in the arrival of an idea.

Imagery for several senses

• Visual: the darkness, the starless window, the snow, the footprints between the trees, the lagging shadow and, in stanza 5, an eye whose green light spreads into a "deepening greenness".
• Tactile: the coldness in stanza 3, and the fox's nose touching a twig and a leaf.
• Olfactory: the sudden, "sharp hot stink" of the fox in stanza 6, the climax of the poem.
• Auditory: the clock, whose ticking frames the poem and is heard again in the last stanza.

The senses build up as the fox comes nearer: first we feel and glimpse it, then we see it vividly, and finally we smell it, the most immediate sense, at the moment it enters the mind.

Symbols

Figures of speech

• Simile: at the start of stanza 3, the fox's nose is said to touch the twig and leaf as coldly and delicately as snow falling in the dark; the comparison is introduced with "as".
• Paradox: in stanza 2 the presence is both nearer and deeper in darkness; and in stanza 3 the unusual image of snow in the dark sets the dimness of night against the usual whiteness of snow.
• Transferred epithet: in "the clock's loneliness" (stanza 1), the speaker's own loneliness is transferred to the clock. It can also be read as personification.
• Synecdoche: the fox is shown through its parts (nose, eyes, prints, shadow and eye) rather than as a whole, building suspense and suggesting that an idea arrives in fragments.
• Metaphor: the mind is called a dark hole in stanza 6, which also suggests a fox's earth or den, so the thought goes home into the head.
• Pun: the fox's "neat prints" in stanza 4 are echoed by the word printed in the final line, linking the tracks in the snow to the words on the page.

Sound devices

• Alliteration: "midnight moment's" in the first line; the d sounds of "delicately" and "dark" in stanza 3; "starless still" in stanza 6.
• Sibilance: the soft s sounds of the first line of stanza 4 suggest quiet, careful steps on snow, while the harsher s and t sounds of "sudden sharp hot stink" in stanza 6 make the climax sharp and sudden.
• Assonance and internal rhyme: the repeated -ing and -ness sounds in the second line of stanza 5, and the long adverbs in the line after, such as "concentratedly", slow the reading down as the eye fills the scene.
• Repetition: "and now, and now" at the end of stanza 3 imitates the fox's hesitant, stop-start steps and the ticking of the clock.
• Half-rhyme: instead of a regular rhyme scheme, Hughes uses loose echoes, such as the matching -ness endings in stanzas 2 and 5.

Structure and syntax

• Form: six quatrains with lines of uneven length and no regular metre.
• Enjambment: after two stanzas of stillness, one long sentence runs from stanza 3 to the second line of stanza 6, flowing over line and stanza breaks, for example from "bold to come" at the end of stanza 4 straight into stanza 5. The syntax moves forward continuously, like the fox.
• Caesura: pauses within lines, such as the comma between twig and leaf in stanza 3 and the semicolon in the third line of stanza 6, make the reader hesitate as the fox hesitates.
• First person and present tense: the experience seems to happen now, as we read.
• Circular structure and a short last line: the window, the clock and the page return at the end, and the very short final line lands with a sense of completion.