Ritual and poetry

https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/SSE/article/viewFile/325/298

About  The Thought Fox

” The poem itself is beautifully modulated in its use of assonance and
off-rhyme. It has the delicate, brilliant and perhaps cold qualities
given to the fox, though it also has its boldness and concentration.
Thus the poem itself enacts the metaphor of the title: it is the
thought-fox.
This sort of wit and concentration is Hughes at his best. His
humour certainly gets blacker, and Crow (1972) is very like an
obscene version of the Road-Runner, but it is a very important
part of his general attitude and poetic manner. In “Pike”, for
example, the changes in tone from the neutral description of the
opening through the off-hand humour of stanza six:
With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
73
SYDNEY STUDIES
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,
High and dry and dead in the willow-herbto
the terrified apprehension of the last stanza:
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
(Selected Poems, pp. 55-56)
form a dramatic and emotional pattern that makes this perhaps
Hughes’s most disturbing poem. The humour is an integral part
of that dark world which so fascinates him. Perhaps it is one of
several things he learnt from Nietzsche.
In an interesting interview with Egbert Faas published in
London Magazine in January 1971, Hughes spoke a good deal
about his concern with “the primeval world”.l He felt that modern
man had turned away from the dark forces and “settled for the
minimum practical energy and illumination”. He attacked “the
psychological stupidity, the ineptitude, of the rigidly rationalist
outlook”, though he did not underestimate the dangerousness of
the non-rational world:
“If you refuse the energy, you are living a kind of death. If you
accept the energy, it destroys you. What is the alternative? To accept
the energy, and find methods of turning it to good, of keeping it
under control-rituals, the machinery of religion. The old method is
the only one.”
This does not mean that Hughes is a Christian, or even sympathetic
to Christianity with its ideals of self-sacrifice (his equation
of the Virgin Mary with the Great Goddess of the primitive world
is highly questionable, whatever cults survived in early Christianity).
I am not sure that it even means that his imagination is
“theological”, as Peter Porter has suggested. But it does mean that
it is religious and that it is concerned with language as magic and
with poems as rituals. “Jaguar” does contain evocations of animal
power and freedom and “The Bull Moses”, one of his greatest
poems, is an apotheosis of primitive sexual strength. This is one
of the reasons, I think, why the poems are so elaborately structured,
why the language is so forceful and compacted. They are
not attempts to express violence or to titillate us with violent
thrills, in the way that you might say Thom Gunn’s poems are,
though we are often conscious of the element of fascination that
Hughes feels. These poems have a real respect for violence and try to treat it as a religious force”