Poem Text Summary (Due to copyright constraints, only a summary)

In "The Thought Fox", a poet sits alone at midnight before a blank page, imagines a fox approaching cautiously through a dark, snowy forest, and, as the fox finally enters his mind, finds that the page has been written: the fox's arrival is the arrival of the poem.

This lesson gives a summary of Ted Hughes's poem in place of its text, which is still under copyright. It sets out the situation (a writer alone at midnight with a clock, a dark window and an empty page), then follows the poem stanza by stanza: the stillness and loneliness of the first two stanzas, the fox appearing piece by piece through the snow in the middle stanzas, and its sudden arrival in the last stanza, when the page is found to be printed. It also describes the poem's shape and explains why the poem can be read both as a description of a fox and as a description of writing a poem.

The Thought Fox: A Summary of the Poem

"The Thought Fox" (in many editions "The Thought-Fox") appeared in Ted Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, published in 1957. It is a short poem of six four-line stanzas (quatrains), 24 lines in all, spoken in the first person and in the present tense. Its subject is the moment when a poem comes into being, which Hughes presents as a fox making its way out of a dark forest.

The situation

It is midnight. The speaker, a writer, is alone in a room. He is aware of a ticking clock, of a window that shows him only darkness, and of the empty sheet of paper in front of him, on which his fingers are moving. He has not yet written anything. The forest he describes is not outside the window: it is a forest he imagines, a forest of the mind.

Stanza by stanza

• Stanza 1: The speaker tells us that, at midnight, he is picturing a forest in his mind. He senses another living presence near him, besides the lonely ticking clock and the empty page.
• Stanza 2: Looking out of the window, he sees no star: the outside world offers him nothing. Yet something is coming closer, something that is nearer to him but also deeper in the darkness, and it is making its way into his solitude.
• Stanza 3: The fox begins to appear, but only in parts. Cold and delicate as snow falling in the dark, its nose touches a twig and a leaf. Its two eyes direct a movement that comes in hesitant steps, one moment after another.
• Stanza 4: The fox leaves neat footprints in the snow between the trees. Its shadow seems to limp and lag behind it, past tree stumps and hollows, as the body moves forward with growing boldness.
• Stanza 5: The fox crosses the open clearings. Its eye now fills the picture, a green light that grows wider and deeper, bright and intensely focused, as the animal follows its own purposes, untroubled by the watcher.
• Stanza 6: Suddenly, with a strong, sharp smell of fox, it enters the speaker's head. No star has appeared in the window and the clock keeps ticking, but the empty page is now covered in writing: the poem has been written.

The shape of the poem

The first two stanzas are still and quiet: they set the scene inside the room. From the third stanza, a single long sentence runs on across the stanza breaks, carrying the fox forward step by step until it arrives in the second line of the final stanza. The last two lines return to the room, which is outwardly unchanged except for one thing: the page that was blank at the start is now full.

Reading the summary on two levels

On one level, the poem describes a fox approaching through a snowy wood. On another, it describes how a thought, and then a poem, arrives in a writer's mind: slowly and cautiously at first, then suddenly and vividly. The fox's footprints in the snow turn into print on the white page. This double meaning is why the poem is called "The Thought Fox": the fox is a thought, and the thought behaves like a fox.