“Poets often focus on a single moment in time” In light of this, examine the way which Ted
Hughes uses the idea of time in his poems.
Time is something which poets tend to explore in a variety of ways, whether it be the mechanical
passing of time, the journey towards the loss of life or childhood, or focusing on a split-second in
which almost anything can happen. The idea of time is prevalent in Ted Hughes’ poetry, often using
things like liminal spaces and this ‘singular moment’ in order to convey ideas of confusion,
inspiration and death, whether it be of nature or of humanity.
In his poem ‘The Thought-Fox’, Hughes describes the process of writing poetry and a period of
writers block through the apparition of a fox. Both the first and last stanzas include ideas about a
page, alluding to writing. “And this blank page, where my fingers move” The adjective ‘blank’ gives
the reader the starting impression that nothing has yet been written and whilst the fingers are
continuously moving, nothing is actually being produced, perhaps hinting at the frustration of the
speaker due to his lack of inspiration. One critic stated that “The feeling about the mechanical
passage of time is an attribute of the work of D.H.Lawrence, someone Hughes admired”, this
maybe highlighting why time was such a big theme in Hughes’ poetry. As the ‘blank page’ is written
about before the manifestation of the fox, time is still moving, highlighted by “something else is
alive / beside the clock’s loneliness” the clock being personified and suggesting the slow passage
of time and isolation of the speaker. The fact that the only other thing, at this moment, besides the
speaker that is ‘alive’ ,and that we are aware of, is the clock, perhaps implies that the speaker has
an overwhelming awareness of how time is passing and a need to slow it down for a moment.
Throughout ‘Poetry in the making’, Hughes discussed how, like a shaman, a poet must take an
imaginative journey into the depths of the psyche - this ‘journey’ perhaps being shown through the
single moment of revelation and inspiration the speaker experiences when the fox begins to
manifest itself. Across the next four stanzas, we seem to lose any sense of time, the speaker now
completely immersed in the emerging fox, that is until the final stanza. The fox “enters the dark
hole of the head”, disappearing, perhaps back into the mind of the speaker, the verb ‘enters’
however could also be interpreted as the speaker finally gaining his inspiration after this moment in
time. That maybe this fox didn’t come from his own imagination, but represented the clarity he
gained through a single moment of revelation. Again, “the clock ticks” returning to the idea of the
passage of time, that this split second has passed and now time has carried on, the fricatives
creating the sound of a clock ticking. Finally, the last line declaratively states “The page is printed.”,
adding a sense of achievement and completion to both the poem and the process the speaker was
working through, contrasting with the ‘blank page’ in the first stanza, highlighting that in a split
second, the page seems to printed itself whilst the speaker was completely engaged with the
apparition of the fox. On top of this, the fact that this poem is written in present tense, seems to
help us to be in the singular moment with the speaker and experience it for ourselves.
The idea of time is also referenced in the first line of this poem “I imagine this midnight moment’s
forest:”, the colon at the end of the sentence creating a pause, implying perhaps the end of time,
the short and sharp nature of it suggesting that there is no continual time frame. On top of this, the
fact that that it’s a moment at ‘midnight’ could have links to mythology as the hours between
midnight and four o’clock are often known as the witching hours, the time in which apparitions,
ghosts and supernatural being are supposed to appear, according to mythology, perhaps
explaining the manifestation of the fox. Furthermore, it could be interpreted that this ‘midnight
moment’ is a liminal space-a moment when time doesn’t really exist, a boundary period between
two segments of time, perhaps between the page being blank at the beginning of the poem and the
page being printed at the end. In anthropology, liminality is ‘the quality of ambiguity or
disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals’ and during this time, people stand ‘at a
threshold’ between their previous ways and their new way that the ritual establishes. Taking this
into account, perhaps the speaker is imagining the existence of the fox to aid the ritualistic writing
process and the fox is the threshold that’s helping the speaker towards their new way of doing
things, in this case, writing poetry. In this moment, nothing exists except the apparition of the fox,
not even time, the ‘midnight’s moment’ appearing to be somewhat of a transitional period for the
speaker. Hughes’ preoccupation with myth started at an early age, stating himself that it was ‘all he
