Explore how Ted Hughes presents the natural world in 'The Thought-Fox'.

Ted Hughes is a poet whose work is very often concerned with the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it. This focus is seen from the very start of his career, with his 1957 anthology The Hawk in the Rain, and in perhaps the best-known poem from this collection, 'The Thought-Fox'. This poem might be read as one of several animal portraits, such as 'Pike' and 'An Otter', which would come to constitute a large portion of his artistic output, as we are told excitedly and with a sense of awe what it feels like to be met with the "sudden sharp hot stink of fox". Yet this is also a work about the artistic process, describing not the physical animal of the fox but a semi-mythological 'Thought-Fox' which, in "entering the loneliness" of the poet's mind, provides both solace and inspiration. This is a poem, then, in which the natural world and the human world bleed into one another, and in which Hughes uses the figure of the fox as a catalyst for a discussion about the nature of imagination and the imaginative power of nature.
One striking feature of the poem is the way in which Hughes imbues his fox with a sense of movement. We are told in the third stanza how the "fox's nose touches twig, leaf", where the use of ellipsis creates an impression of immediacy, as though we are following the animal's actions in real time. This is compounded by the subsequent end-stopping of this line with a semicolon, forcing us, like the fox, to pause in consideration of its surroundings. After this moment of stillness comes two and a half stanzas' full of forwards motion, reinforced by the mechanically rhythmic repetition of "now /And again now, and now, and now"; the propulsive alliteration of "Sets neat prints into the snow /Between trees"; and the internal assonance of the "widening deepening greenness " which the fox traverses. In each of these cases, the animal's movement is set against a backdrop of nature, whether the "twig" which he sniffs at or the snow which he marks with "prints". Rather than presenting a harmonious picture of a creature at one with his surroundings, however, this shows the fox as not entirely belonging to this habitat, which he seems both to defile and ignore on his journey towards the human narrator. The fox occupies a liminal space, travelling between the worlds of nature and of mankind without fully belonging to either.