Ted Hughes The Thought-Fox Summary

When writing, it seems as though we’ve all traveled the road of putting ourselves in a silent and focused state, channeling all of our energy into producing words, yet our hands and thoughts are frozen. We sit for what seems like hours, looking around for something to pull from, while the blank page stares back at us. All of the sudden, the beginning of an idea starts to take shape, and we take action. “The Thought-Fox”, by Ted Hughes, abstractly describes this state of adversity, along with the process of one’s thoughts in the act of writing. This state of adversity can be denoted as writer’s block, and through exercises like free writing, we as a class have worked on this by welcoming our thoughts onto the page with no filter. Hughes uses a fox as a vessel of these concepts, describing its materialization into the world from

Their thoughts are making up the fox, but the fox represents how it is so. The fox personifies the process of a poem coming to fruition, while acting as the inspiration that the speaker has to coax out of their head with words, until the end, when it is finally secured on the page. Throughout the poem, the fox’s mannerisms connote the thought-process of the speaker while writing. Hughes uses soft imagery and holds back the subject of the fox to emphasize its slow incarnation ‒ “Cold, delicately as the dark snow/A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf” (9, 10) ‒ just as the creative process can be timely in its commencement. The fox is walking by, “[Setting] neat prints into the snow,” (Hughes 13) and it’s accentuated by, “And again now, and now, and now” (Hughes 12), but these lines also give the impression of the speaker writing (“setting”) their words onto a blank page (“snow”), and the repeated “nows” imply typing. This comparison has a conspicuous similarity to a part in Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer”, when the speaker compares his daughter’s typing to the trapped