I remember a luminous floating breathlessness the first time I read this poem, in the dusty yellow light of the cage I worked in (a literal cage: one chainlink wall separated my gray metal desk and the cramped, brown-and-tan linoleumed room it sat in from a store-room where crippled book trucks awaited repair amid stacks of gray metal shelving and the hulks of gray metal file cabinets whose drawers were too battered to close). This was 1970. My job in the campus library was to take books from the book truck parked by my desk and type up a new catalog card for each one, using the Library of Congress (LC) call numbers from slips stuck into the books by the catalog librarian. The novelist James Michener had donated a pile of dough to build a new library up the hill from the central campus, and it would use the LC system. Work-study students like me were tasked with helping with the transition.
The variety of books I handled was remarkable, and because the librarian (her name, as I recall, was Judy Pitch) knew I was an aspiring poet, she kindly tried to make sure that I got hold of any poetry that came through for conversion. One day, Ted Hughes‘s first collection The Hawk in the Rain was there, and I devoted my lunch hour to read it through—at too fast a clip. The manuscript of the book had won The Poetry Center’s First Publication book contest, judged by Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender—and I never got over the notion that Hughes must have been not much older than I was then when he wrote “The Thought-Fox.” (I didn’t find out until much later that he’d been four years older than I when that signature poem came to him, at age 24.) I read the poem over and over in my cage, painfully aware that I could not write anything like it and that I almost certainly never would. But it offered an illumination—the kind narcissistic young poets need most: it showed me the feeling I knew I would be looking for whenever I sat down to write.
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 nowSets 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 comeAcross clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own businessTill, 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.
Sillitoe ! Hughes !<br /><br />we ain't just-uh-whistling-dixie here these are Giants!<br /><br />the name Ruth Fainlight new to me…<br /><br />going up to the Wheaton Library tomorrow where in their basement they sell at about 10 cents on the dollar books 'discontinued' from all of the county library branches.. las time I was there they had 100s of poetry books<br /><br />on
I've only ever had the 1970 Faber edition of <i>Crow</i>, which (according to Paul Keegan's editor's notes to Hughes's <i>Collected Poems</i>) did not include seven poems published in the 1971 American edition. All but one of those ("Lovepet") were included in the expanded second edition issued by Faber in 1972. Intriguingly enough, Keegan writes, "Many Crow poems
Great post and poem, Joe. One extra benefit of your post is finding out you were a work-study student! (I did my part working in Seattle housing projects, finding tutors for kids). Oh, by the way–I also have that 1971 edition of CROW.
I've kept his CROW (1971, Harper & Row)<br /><br />& of course<br /> Tales from OVID<br /><br />he is vastly & has gotten a bad reputation mostly via "political correctness"<br /><br />or some such Plath "stuff"<br /><br />one of the poems in CROW is titled:<br /> "Truth Kills Everybody"<br /><br />Leonard
Joseph,<br /><br />I'm a Ted Hughes admirer, too: I think he's probably the last century's greatest nature poet. Superb writing.