![]()
'Gullivers
Travels' and original sin
Earth | Moon: A Ted Hughes Website
|
‘The Thought Fox’ and the poetry of Ted Hughes
Through the window I see no star:
Though deeper within darkness Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness, 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.
THE ‘THOUGHT-FOX’ HAS
often been acknowledged as one of the most
completely realised and artistically satisfying of the poems in Ted
Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain. At the same time
it is one of the most frequently anthologised of all Hughes’s poems. In
this essay I have set out to use what might be regarded as a very ordinary
analysis of this familiar poem in order to focus attention on an aspect of
Hughes’s poetry which is sometimes neglected. My particular interest is in
the underlying puritanism of Hughes’s poetic vision and in the conflict
between violence and tenderness which seems to be directly engendered by
this puritanism.
Though deeper within darkness
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow. ..
In the first two lines of this passage the rhythm of the verse is broken
by the punctuation and the line-endings, while at the same time what
seemed the predictable course of the rhyme-scheme is deliberately departed
from. Both rhythmically and phonetically the verse thus mimes the nervous,
unpredictable movement of the fox as it delicately steps forward, then
stops suddenly to check the terrain before it runs on only to stop again.
The tracks which the fox leaves in the snow are themselves duplicated by
the sounds and rhythm of the line ‘Sets neat prints into the snow’. The
first three short words of this line are internal half-rhymes, as neat, as
identical and as sharply outlined as the fox’s paw-marks, and these words
press down gently but distinctly into the soft open vowel of ‘snow’. The
fox’s body remains indistinct, a silhouette against the snow. But the
phrase ‘lame shadow’ itself evokes a more precise image of the fox, as it
freezes alertly in its tracks, holding one front-paw in mid-air, and then
moves off again like a limping animal. At the end of the stanza the words
‘bold to come’ are left suspended – as though the fox is pausing at the
outer edge of some trees. The gap between the stanzas is itself the
clearing which the fox, after hesitating warily, suddenly shoots across:
‘Of a body that is bold to come / Across clearings. ..’
At this point in the poem the hesitant rhythm of that single sentence
which is prolonged over five stanzas breaks into a final and deliberate
run. The fox has scented safety. After its dash across the clearing of the
stanza-break, it has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet and
upon the reader: an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business. ..
After discussing ‘The thought-fox’ in his book
The Art of Ted Hughes, Keith Sagar writes: ‘Suddenly, out of the
unknown, there it is, with all the characteristics of a living thing – “a
sudden sharp hot stink of fox”. A simple trick like pulling a kicking
rabbit from a hat, but only a true poet can do it’.[2]
In this particular instance it seems to me that the simile Sagar uses
betrays him into an inappropriate critical response His comparison may be
apt in one respect, for it is certainly true that there is a powerful
element of magic in the poem. But this magic has little to do with
party-conjurors who pull rabbits out of top-hats. It is more like the
sublime and awesome magic which is contained in the myth of creation,
where God creates living beings out of nothingness by the mere fiat
of his imagination.
The very sublimity and God-like nature of Hughes’s vision can engender
uneasiness. For Hughes’s fox has none of the freedom of an animal. It
cannot get up from the page and walk off to nuzzle its young cubs or do
foxy things behind the poet’s back. It cannot even die in its own mortal,
animal way. For it is the poet’s creature, wholly owned and possessed by
him, fashioned almost egotistically in order to proclaim not its own
reality but that of its imaginatively omnipotent creator. (I originally
wrote these words before coming across Hughes’s own discussion of
the poem in Poetry in the Making: ‘So, you see, in some ways my fox
is better than an ordinary fox. It will live for ever, it will never
suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go. And I made
it. And all through imagining it clearly enough and finding the living
words’ (p. 21).) This feeling of uneasiness is heightened by the last stanza of the poem. For although this stanza clearly communicates the excitement of poetic creation, it seems at the same time to express an almost predatory thrill; it is as though the fox has successfully been lured into a hunter’s trap. The bleak matter-of-factness of the final line – ’The page is printed’ – only reinforces the curious deadness of the thought-fox. If, at the end of the poem, there is one sense in which the fox is vividly and immediately alive, it is only because it has been pinned so artfully upon the page. The very accuracy of the evocation of the fox seems at times almost fussily obsessive. The studied and beautifully ‘final’ nature of the poem indicates that we are not in the presence of any untrained spontaneity, any primitive or naive vision. It might be suggested that the sensibility behind Hughes’s poem is more that of an intellectual – an intellectual who, in rebellion against his own ascetic rationalism, feels himself driven to hunt down and capture an element of his own sensual and intuitive identity which he does not securely possess.
The conflict of sensibility which Hughes unconsciously dramatises in ‘The
thought-fox’ runs through all his poetry. On the one hand there is in his
work an extraordinary sensuous and sensual generosity which coexists with
a sense of abundance and a capacity for expressing tenderness which are
unusual in contemporary poetry .These qualities are particularly in
evidence in some of the most mysteriously powerful of all his poems –
poems such as ‘Crow’s undersong’, ‘Littleblood’, ‘Full moon and little
Frieda’ and ‘Bride and groom lie hidden for three days’ .On the other hand
his poetry – and above all his poetry in Crow – is notorious for
the raging intensity of its violence, a violence which, by some critics at
least, has been seen as destructive of all artistic and human values.
Hughes himself seems consistently to see his own poetic sensitivity as
‘feminine’ and his poetry frequently gives the impression that he can
allow himself to indulge this sensitivity only within a protective shell
of hard, steely ‘masculine’ violence.
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
She, too, pursues her ends,
The last line is finely balanced between the fragility of ‘pale’ and the
steeliness of ‘metal’ – a word whose sound softens and moderates its sense
.The line serves to evoke a precise visual image of the snowdrop, the
relative heaviness of whose flower cannot be entirely supported by its
frail stem. But at the same time the phrase ‘her pale head’ minimally
continues the personification which is first established by the pronoun
‘she’. In this way the feminine snowdrop – a little incarnation, almost,
of the White Goddess – is located within that world of frozen and sleeping
vitality which is created by the poem, a vitality which can only be
preserved, it would seem, if it is encased within a hard, metallic,
evolutionary will.
The beauty of this poem resides precisely in the way
that a complex emotional ambivalence is reflected through language. But if
we can withdraw ourselves from the influence of the spell which the poem
undoubtedly casts, the vision of the snowdrop cannot but seem an alien
one. What seems strange about the poem is the lack of any recognition that
the snowdrop survives not because of any hidden reserves of massive
evolutionary strength or will, but precisely because of its frailty – its
evolutionary vitality is owed directly to the very delicacy, softness and
flexibility of its structure. In Hughes’s poem the purposeless and
consciousless snowdrop comes very near to being a little Schopenhauer
philosophising in the rose-garden, a little Stalin striving to disguise an
unmanly and maidenly blush behind a hard coat of assumed steel. We might
well be reminded of Hughes’s own account of the intentions which lay
behind his poem ‘Hawk roosting’. ‘Actually what I had in mind’, Hughes has
said, ‘was that in this hawk Nature is thinking … I intended some creator
like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine.’ But, as Hughes himself is
obliged to confess, ‘He doesn’t sound like Isis, mother of the gods, which
he is. He sounds like Hitler’s familiar spirit.’ In an attempt to account
for the gap between intention and performance Hughes invokes cultural
history: ‘When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually
kicked out was Nature. ..and nature became the devil.’[4]
This piece of rationalisation, however, seems all too like an attempt to
externalise a conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. The
conflict in question is the same as that which may be divined both in ‘The
thought-fox’ and in ‘Snowdrop’ , in which a frail sensuousness which might
be characterised as , ‘feminine’ can be accepted only after it has been
subordinated to a tough and rational will. The conflict between violence and tenderness which is present in an oblique form throughout Hughes’ early poetry is one that is in no sense healed or resolved in his later work. Indeed it might be suggested that much of the poetic and emotional charge of this later work comes directly from an intensification of this conflict and an increasingly explicit polarisation of its terms. The repressed tenderness of ‘Snowdrop’ or the tough steely sensibility which is expressed in ‘Thrushes’, with its idealisation of the ‘bullet and automatic / Purpose’ of instinctual life, is seemingly very different to the all but unprotected sensuous delicacy of ‘Littleblood’, the poem with which Hughes ends Crow:
O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
In pointing to the role which is played by a particular conflict of
sensibility in Hughes’s poetry I am not in any way seeking to undermine
the case which can – and should – be made for what would conventionally be
called Hughes’s poetic ‘greatness’. Indeed, my intention is almost the
reverse of this. For it seems to me that one of the factors which
moderates or diminishes the imaginative power of some of Hughes’s early
poetry is precisely the way in which an acute conflict which is central to
his own poetic sensibility tends to be disguised or, suppressed. In
Crow, which I take to be Hughes’s most extraordinary poetic
achievement to date, Hughes, almost for the first time, assumes
imaginative responsibility for the puritanical violence which is present
in his poetry from the very beginnings. In doing so he seems to take full
possession of his own poetic powers. It is as though a conflict which had,
until that point, led a shadowy and underworld existence, is suddenly
cracked open in order to disgorge not only its own violence but also all
that imaginative wealth and vitality which had been half locked up within
it.
The most obvious precedent for such a violent
eruption of imaginative powers is that which is provided by Shakespeare,
and perhaps above all by King Lear. Lear is a play of extraordinary
violence whose persistent image, as Caroline Spurgeon has observed, is
that ‘of a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten,
pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured,
and finally broken on the rack’.[5]
But at the same time it is a play about a man who struggles to repossess
his own tenderness and emotional vitality and to weep those tears which,
at the beginning of the play, he contemptuously dismisses as soft, weak
and womanly. The same conflict reappears throughout Shakespeare’s poetry.
We have only to recall Lady Macbeth’s renunciation of her own ‘soft’
maternal impulses in order to appreciate the fluency of Shakespeare’s own
imaginative access to this conflict and the disturbing cruelty of its
terms:
I have given suck, and know
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, Have done to this. (I. vii)
In taking this approach I am motivated in part by the feeling that the discussion of Hughes’s poetry has sometimes been too much in thrall to a powerful cultural image of Hughes’s poetic personality – one which he himself has tended to project. In this image Hughes is above all an isolated and embattled figure who has set himself against the entire course both of modern poetry and of modern history .He is rather like the hero in one of his most powerful poems ‘Stealing trout on a May morning’, resolutely and stubbornly wading upstream, his feet rooted in the primeval strength of the river’s bed as the whole course of modern history and modern puritanical rationalism floods violently past him in the opposite direction, bearing with it what Hughes himself has called ‘mental disintegration … under the super-ego of Moses … and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’, and leaving him in secure possession of that ancient and archaic imaginative energy which he invokes in his poetry.
The alternative to this Romantic view of Hughes’s poetic personality is to
see Hughes’s poetry as essentially the poetry of an intellectual, an
intellectual who is subject to the rigours of ‘puritanical rationalism’
just as much as any other intellectual but who, instead of submitting to
those rigours, fights against them with that stubborn and intransigent
resolution which belongs only to the puritan soul. Notes [1] Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making (Faber, 1967), p. 20. [2] Keith Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1979), p. 19 [3] See Poetry in the Making, chapter 1 [4] Interview with Ekbert Faas, 1970. Reprinted in Faas, Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe (Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 197
[5]
Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery (1935), p. 339 [6] Mark Spilka, ‘Lawrence’s quarrel with tenderness’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 9, No. 4 (winter 1967). Ian D. Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate (Penguin, 1960), esp. chapter 6.
First published in Critical Quarterly, vol, 26, no. 4 Winter 1984
…………………………………………………………
© Richard Webster, 2002
www.richardwebster.net
|