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Thought-Fox

Dreamed 1960 by Ted Hughes
as told by his friend Al Alvarez

He read English when he went up to Cambridge, then changed to anthropology. He switched because of a dream which he told me soon after we first met. He was labouring late at night, he said, on his weekly essay--I think it was about Dr Johnson--bored by it and getting nowhere. Finally he gave up and went to bed.

That night he dreamed a fox came into his college room, went over to his desk, peered at the unfinished essay and shook its head in disgust. Then it placed a paw on the scribbled pages and they burst into flame.

The next day Hughes wrote a poem about the dream--"The Thought-Fox"--and left it on his desk when he went to bed.

The same night the dream-fox was back. It read the poem, nodded approvingly and gave the sleeping poet a genial thumbs-up.

Hughes took the visitation as a sign: the academic study of literature wasn't for him; it was time to change his life as well as his degree course. Anthropology may not altogether have been what he was after, but at least it concerned itself with more primitive and instinctual societies than our own.

That was how he told me the story in 1960--wryly, almost as a joke against himself. Later, when he told it to Professor John Carey, an eminently sane and reliable witness, he had translated it into something Jungian and more portentous: the fox was another persona--Hughes with a fox's head.

Yet it doesn't matter that the wild animals went with a belief in mysteries, the under-life and black magic, or that he increasingly used what I thought was mumbo-jumbo to get where he wanted to be--astrology, hypnosis, Ouija boards, or the dottier forms of Jungian magical thinking. (Jung, like Hughes, was a country boy fallen among intellectuals.) All that mattered was that the poems he fished out of the depths were shimmering with life.

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.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Given how popular this poem seems to be, I guess I shouldn't confess I prefer his raw, simple dream-account. But I do.

On the other paw, the fox wasn't praising his poem over his dream-account. What it approved was a life writing poetry over a life writing academic essays. Good call, fox.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Where Did It All Go Right? by Al Alvarez, p.200-201


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