THOUGHT FOX:

The Thought-Fox starts on a silent, clear night. The poet, sitting alone at his desk,
attempts to write, but has no luck with it. He senses a second presence something
more near / though deeper within darkness / is entering the loneliness. Here, the night
itself is symbolic of the depths of imagination, standing for the idea of dormant genius,
and the muse, which typically visits at unorthodox hours. The poet is alone at night,
labouring over his poem, when he feels the stirrings of an idea.
The idea itself is symbolized by the foxs presence, and at first, it is not clear what the
idea is, to the poet. As Hughes writes, a foxs nose touches twig, leaf; showing, through
the fragmented image of the foxs nose, that it is only a very basic view of an idea, not
one stamped out clearly. The fox is shrouded in darkness; only the pinnacle of it can be
seen by the watchful poet, and likewise, the muse visits but only leaves him with a
fragment of an image to build into a poem. The fox remains half-hidden and elusive
throughout the entire poem; the idea, likewise, remains half-hidden to the poet, allowing
him only wisps of imagery to contend with. There is a certain softness about the way that
Hughes writes his imagery: his penchant for mythical language comes through in spades
as he talks about the dark snow, the eye / a widening deepening greenness. Hughes
has an almost cinematic quality of imagery one can very easily imagine the quiet night,
the poet at his desk, the fox touching a leaf in a separate shot and he uses this to
further evoke the idea of the playful muse, sneaking in, and sneaking out of the poets
grasp.
Gradually, the fox emerges out of formlessness; a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, thus
showing that the poet has reached the peak of his musing, and has managed to write the
poem that has tantalized him throughout the night. The fox is suddenly visible, the idea
is suddenly within the poets mind, and has been immortalized on the page. The poem
and the fox exist as one entity.
Another thing to note is the very pattern of the poem itself. Ted Hughes writes with a
pace that heightens the anticipation. At the start, only the foxs nose is visible. Then two
eyes. The choppy punctuation shows the hesitancy of the fox/idea, the delicate way that
Ted Hughes writes about the fox leaving prints in the snow is further emphasized by the
sharp, short phrase sets neat prints in the snow. The Thought-Fox moves almost like
clockwork, starting out at an hour crawl, and quickening, the image of the fox becoming
more concrete, until the final staggering end where the fox comes out in a rush again,
symbolized in the way that Hughes writes about it only to dim back down into quiet
the window is starless still; the clock ticks; / The page is printed.
Hughes wrote, on this poem, And I suppose that long after I am gone, as long as a copy
of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the
darkness and come walking towards them.

WIND:
Wind is both within and out of Hughes normal style of writing most of his most
formidable works of poetry take place within such suspended periods, but personify the
moment using animals; in Wind there is nothing even vaguely humanistic present
throughout the whole poem, thus lending to it an air of almost complete animosity and
luck; the people at the mercy of nature cannot do anything but wait for the night to end,
and in a jump from his regular style, Hughes is not interested in describing this act of
nature in the loving detail that he has shown in works such as The Thought-Fox. Instead,
the description is written through action: what happens, and what doesnt, leaving the
image to develop inside the readers mind without the addition of very many adjectives.
It works well for this poem; the detailed actions provide enough that the reader can
imagine the house and the family, the vibrant anger of nature, the terrifying power it
wields, and how helpless man is in the face of it.
ANALYSIS:

Our first introduction to the storm is a brief one; Hughes merely writes this house has
been far out at sea all night, and it is interesting to notice how evocative the imagery is;
in one line, Hughes has given us the idea of the house as a ship, storm-tossed and
floating upon angered waves, at the mercy of the water. It gives the reader an
immediate idea of the ferocity of the storm, as well as of the isolation of the house in
the readers mind, one imagines the land, broken only by trees or hills, but barren of any
other life, and its a fragile thing to consider. Should something go wrong during this
storm, the family is completely cut off from the rest of the world, isolated in the depths
of angered darkness that is more than capable of breaking the boat into pieces.
Notice the onomatopoeia in lines 2-4: crashing, booming, stampeding, floundering,
all big words of even bigger actions, crazy noise adding to the general unease of the first
stanza; it is not just the wind that has been turned into an animal, but the rest of nature
as well. The loneliness of the house is deepened. There is truly no other presence on the
hill beside the storm, and the house, and that heightens the atmosphere of the poem to
an almost fervent pitch.
Hughes writes, the hills had new places, thus showing the power of the storm not only
did it rage for an entire night, but it has shifted some topography and changed the
landscape, it has changed the face of the hills, leaving behind an unfamiliar stretch of
nature. Taking this a step further, imagine it from the point of view of the family; their
home has now become a foreign place to them, as barren as a battlefield, and the storm
that has shifted this power has not yet died down. In the same line, Hughes uses the
world wielded, giving the wind an almost warlike intelligence wielded is mostly used
for weapons, as well, which shows a state of menace on behalf of the wind and of nature
towards the humans who are living on the hills. This is the first presence in the poem of
another human. Hughes writes, At noon I scaled along the house-side, and the use of
the word scaled brings to mind the image of mountaineering explorers, and to apply
this same image to the use of the word house-side, to apply it to the image of a family
cowering inside their house, somehow brings out the menace of the storm even further.
It turns a happy, familiar symbol that of the lit house, the family silhouetted in the
window into something threatening. Even the lord and master of the house cannot
venture outside for any longer than a few minutes without being swept away by the
wind. Man, in this instance, is wholly small and easily destroyed by the presence of
nature.
The man looks up, and the wind attacks him, it dented the balls of my eyes; this is how
strong the wind is, how forceful it is, and how weak the man is. Further stating it, he
goes, the tent of the hills drummed and strained its guy rope the landscape has
become, once again, both unfamiliar and flimsy. A guy rope is used, sometimes, to
anchor a tent to the ground, but here it is used to imply that the earth itself is about to
be torn loose from its holdings and sent skittering away on the wings of that angry wind.
More references, here, to the winds strength it leaves the fields quivering, the skyline
a grimace, / At any second to band and vanish with a flap;. Its strength is such that it is
in danger of tearing apart the whole world as though it is nothing more than tissue
paper. The skyline, in particular, is such an evocative imagery; it implies that the wind is
stronger, perhaps, than even God. What is God to the rage of nature? Nothing, according
to Hughes, in a fit of temper, the wind will smash everything in its way.
In the third line, Hughes shows the violence is not just restricted to other things, but also
to elements of itself. He writes that it flung a magpie away again, the carelessness of
nature and that it bent like an iron bar slowly a black-back gull; it is so strong,
according to Hughes, that it is forcing things outside of its shape to take the shape of
other things.