a winter poem for the new year

[timeripple]

"The Thought Fox" by Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Comments

[idiosyncreant.livejournal.com]

Lovely. This is going in my common-place book!

[timeripple.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you like it!

I always feel a little bit guilty about loving anything by Ted Hughes because of Sylvia Plath. But not for long, because much of his work is visually, viscerally exquisite. And he wrote my favorite essay on poetic meter in Winter Pollen.

[idiosyncreant.livejournal.com]

know what you mean
though I'm pretty sure depression is not any particular person's fault...I feel that way about her *own* poetry, actually.

I'll have to read that! Poetic meter signally fails to interest me, and I feel this should not be so. Especially not when I occasionally have people read my poetry...

[timeripple.livejournal.com]

I love the essay; he scans a line of Gerald Manley Hopkins five different ways and talks about the problem of shoehorning a language based on syllable emphasis (English) into a meter designed for languages based on syllable length. (Uh, it might be more interesting if you know Greek or Latin. I've never read anything about the mechanics of Japanese or Korean poetry, and obviously neither has he, so you might have an interesting take with your knowledge of those languages as well as your work in English.)