The Thought Fox By Plath Hughes Analysis

It is difficult not to read Hughes’s and Plath’s poetry in relation to each other due to their intimate relationship and their support for each other’s career during their marriage. In Plath’s journals she wrote “All my pat theories against marrying a writer dissolve with Ted: his rejections more than double my sorrow & his acceptances rejoice me more than mine,” thus showing that they shared each other’s goals in life (Hampl 1995: 4). In a BBC interview with both Hughes and Plath, Hughes said that “he and Plath have ‘a single, shared mind,’ ‘a telepathic union’ that was ‘a source of great deal’ in his poetry,” whereas Plath said that she thought “all the poems [they] wrote to each other and about each other were really before [their] marriage.”

‘The Thought Fox’ is made up of six unrhymed quatrains and uses punctuation to differentiate from the room in which the speaker is writing, in lines 1 to 4, and then to the fox outside in the snow, which is one continuous sentence from line 5 through to 22. This difference in form could be an indication of how the different stages and events through Hughes’s life affected his writing. ‘The Thought Fox’ is significantly less violent and bleak compared to the poems within ‘Crow’, the fox is timid and “sets neat prints into the snow” as though the idea of the poem crept up on Hughes, it suggests a period of intrigue and even procrastination as the speaker is awake at “midnight” with a “blank page” (Longley 2010:

The inventive imagery within Plath’s poetry allows the reader an insight into her frame of mind, and though she could be seen as a confessional poet through the specific details that she includes from her own life, we do see how she has manipulated these events and characters within her poems to realise the outcome she desires, as seen in ‘Lady Lazarus’. But even when she is not directly referring to a personal detail, the reader is still able to interpret the speaker’s emotions within poems, and in many instances correlate them to Plath’s own feelings. Despite this, it is difficult to separate Plath’s poetry from the circumstances of her tragic death, and thus the reader imprints their own idea of how Plath might have felt whilst writing her later poetry. This also applies to Hughes, after Plath’s suicide, when his poetry became raw and macabre with the birth of ‘Crow’, and though Hughes is not deemed a biographical poet in the way that Plath is, his poetry does portray his emotions just as strongly as Plath’s does. He too uses imagery and form to capture the grim violence within the collection. The reader can deduce the fragile emotional state that Hughes had to endure through a difficult period of his life through the character of ‘Crow’ within his poems. When reading the poetry that Plath produced just prior