THE THOUGHT-FOX
It’s common for poets – and, indeed, for artists of every type – to assert that their best ideas just seem to come to them, whole and fully-formed, apparently from nowhere. Those works that they have to consciously, and perhaps mechanically, labour over often turn out, it would seem, to be the least satisfactory. Examples of these kinds of statements are legion, but let us stick with Ted Hughes for one particularly striking example.
The story goes that while still an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1950s, Hughes, exhausted from writing a constant stream of essays on literature, fell asleep at his desk one night. These essays, he felt, were not truly creative exercises, more a kind of analytical labour. As if to bring home this fact to him, a memorable dream – a message from another realm, if you will – gave him a harsh, yet beautifully expressed message. In it, a flaming bipedal fox entered Hughes’s room, walked across to the essay that lay still unfinished on his desk, and left a burning paw-print on the paper before turning to Hughes and saying, in no uncertain terms: “You are killing us.”
The import of the fox’s message was obvious to Hughes: the beautiful and numinous image of the fox represented his poetic instincts – raw, natural, aflame – and too much conscious mental drudgery was killing them off. As a result, he switched his course from English to anthropology, his studies of ‘primitive’ belief-systems later providing a distinct influence on his work. Later in life, Hughes came to view the poet as being, in a sense, almost a shaman, a communicator with an eternal realm from which he brought back great treasures, expressed in combinations of beautiful words. From this perspective, the burning fox could be seen as Hughes’s totemic animal, a kind of messenger from the spirit world. Certainly, it was a remarkable spontaneous image – fully formed, coherent and possessing a great deal of mysterious beauty. Like many a great poetic conceit, it seems to have arrived ‘just like that’, apparently from nowhere. As you might expect, Hughes later incorporated the dream-message into one of his best poems, The Thought-Fox, in which he talks of sitting, blank-minded, in front of an essay,
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.
Here, the “dark hole of the head” clearly represents the sort of mental state in which anything approaching inspiration is completely absent – and no amount of conscious thought can fill this void with anything worthwhile. The only solution, for Hughes, is to go to sleep and wait for something to burst into his consciousness of its own accord. Once it has, as he then puts it: “The page is printed”. The poem, at least in terms of its essential imagery, if not its final line-by-line construction, has written itself rather than being consciously created by the poet.
So, did Hughes really write this poem? His name might be on the front cover of his book, but were the ideas themselves actually his? Most of us would say, yes, of course he did, perhaps with a little help from his subconscious. But there have been a number of attempts to reconfigure the role of the poet not simply as a gifted craftsman or artist, but as a communicator with some kind of eternal – and perhaps even supernatural – realm.
