328 PART THREE
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.While Hughes’s clipped angular twang projects an odor of fox, this poem’s
keynote sounds at the outset: “I imagine.”
A predator—nose, eyes, prints, wary, concentrated—moves through the
poem’s landscape fitting the fox’s pace: ongoing stanzas with flexible line lengths
rhyming like trees along a trail, constant but no two alike. Hughes later wanted
even livelier words for his creature ’s movements, “the twitch and craning of
its ears, the slight tremor of its hanging tongue and its breath making little
clouds, its teeth bared in the cold, the snow-crumbs dropping from its pads as
it lifts each one in turn.” Such a zoom lens would only sharpen the mystery of
a “Thought-Fox... deeper within darkness.” As both fox and spirit it “enters
the dark hole of the head,” the fox’s “own business” becomes the poet ’s. This
midnight creation myth also undermines Britain’s pastoral tradition, including
its foxhunt mystique.
Hughes’s contemporary Adrienne Rich has something of the same creative im-
pulse. Her “fox, panting, fire-eyed, / gone to earth in my chest,” enters an early
poem. And in the title poem of Fox (2001), “I needed fox Badly I needed /