Ted Hughes

On the online site for formal poetry Able Muse in the discussion forum Musing on Mastery Alicia Stallings Homepage is moderating a discussion on "nature poetry"…and mostly on the late English poet, Ted Hughes.

Here is one piece Stallings fancies:

THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

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.

I recall this was the lead off poem in Hughes' own selected, so he must have liked it too.

Hughes is a poet I don't quite trust…that is, I don't trust my own taste when I like him. I'm not altogether sure why that is - it may be that his most effective poems are generally short, and fairly direct, and don't seem to tackle anything much beyond "nature - red in tooth and claw"…or something.

A joke, which circulates about Hughes, is that he couldn't write a good poem longer than ten lines…and the above may be no exception.

The fox in the poem above is a symbol for mysterious Inspiration, but in the heart of the poem the fox seems eerily real…and the "point" about inspiration (whatever the point is) is well worth losing.

FOX

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about it’s own business.

Now it is a poem about a fox, rather more interesting than Hughes' Creative Process. And just a little over ten lines!

Andrew