Tuesday, September 07, 2010

The Thought-fox



Homage to Ted Hughes by Reginald Gray.
Held by Bankfield Museum, Yorkshire


This is a Ted Hughes poem about the poet's creative process of how a poem appears on a blank page. I think we had this in Class IX textbooks in school. Does anyone remember?

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 twing, 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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i do i do i do. i could feel letters printing on my mind page and a chill going thru my heart as i read the poem for the first time. a palpable tight twitch i can feel even now. thanks for posting it. may be it will draw us to creative processes all over again?

prachi...