The coldness, the snow doesn’t move i.e. it is stagnant but the fox does. This is similar to the mind as the brain which harbours the thoughts don’t move anywhere, yet the thoughts inside are always being created.
The first stanza shows that Hughes knows there is ‘Something else alive’, i.e. he knows there is something to write about on ‘this blank page’, has two meaning. This shows that he is looking for some inspiration, or a thought.
‘this blank page’ could have two meanings to it. He could be talking about the paper he is writing on or it could mean his mind waiting for the thought to come.
The alliteration ‘midnight moment’s’ adds to the atmosphere of loneliness and desolateness. The stanza has a very slow pace and describes the ‘clock’s loneliness’ personifying it to be the only thing accompanying Hughes while he is looking for inspiration.
The word ‘loneliness’ is a very long word which adds to the slow pace of the poem. Also the full stop at the end shows that this part of the poem is complete and separate from the poem, it is a whole entity.
‘Through the window, I see no star’. This indicates to us that Hughes is clearly writing in an area where visibility into the skies is very low i.e. a place plagued with pollution, most likely London.
The phrase: ‘Something more near’, gives us a sense that the inspiration Hughes is looking for is not as far as the stars, but much nearer to him.
‘Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:’
The inspiration Hughes mentions in the first stanza, ‘something else is alive’ is beginning to enter his mind/ to confront Hughes.
The third stanza illustrates the thought – the fox – coming out of the darkness. The first sign of movement by the fox is described as,
‘A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf:’
And again now, and now, and now’
The fox is slowly and timidly appearing, decreasing its distance towards you as it takes each step. This is like the thought slowly being revealed.
The pace has now picked up and keeps on increasing as in the next stanza, there is no punctuation at the end of each line allowing the reader to read quickly.
The ‘neat prints into the snow’ is compared to the words Hughes writes to create the poem. The fox, being the thought, is leaving its marks on the blank piece of paper as it moves around.
The fox’s footprints are a metaphor for the words being imprinted in Hughes’ mind and the snow is a metaphor for the blank page.
‘Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come’
The fox is slowly passing through the forest with these obstacles coming in its way. This animal is known to be cunning as it creeps towards you but the attack can be over in a few moments.
Similarly, the thought is slowly coming through but Ted Hughes’ mind has to first over come the obstacle such as what to write and what not to.
Ted Hughes mentioned before that in bad poetry, many of the words kill each other, e.g. using the word ‘feather’ followed by ‘treacle’ a few words later. That is why you have to be careful with choosing the correct words.
The last stanza is when the thought has completely developed; it comes very sudden almost out of no where like the fox
‘ with a sudden hot sink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.’
After the thought has appeared to Hughes, it immediately returns back to its hiding place, where it came from.
He ends the poem in a very definite, precise manor. ‘The page is printed.’
‘Roe-Deer’ has a different tone to that of the fox. The theme of nature occurs throughout, but is more sinister.
The poem is about both worlds of nature and humans coming together overlapping in an ‘all-way disintegration’ as Hughes encounters two deer.
The first two stanzas are each ended with full stops, slowing the pace at the beginning of the poem. It demonstrates the stanzas separate, complete entities.
In the first stanza the light is described as ‘dawn-dirty’, and the deer as ‘blue-dark’. These are just a few of the compound words Hughes uses in this poem to create a better imagery of the object he is describing.
‘They had happened into my dimension’ indicates that this was a weird coincidence that the deer came to him after they had been living in secret away from humans for ‘two or three years’.
Hughes writes that the deer
‘planted their’ ‘secret deer hood
Clear on’ his ‘snow–screen vision of the abnormal’
His snow screen vision indicates his limited vision, but this could be a pun. He could be using it to literally describe his vision being almost blinded by the immense amount of snow, or he could be trying to say that the sighting of the deer is so rare that he has never seen anything as mysterious or amazing as this before.
The word ‘secret’ tells us that the deer live their lives without humans, and that they do not need them to survive.
Hughes uses an enjambment between the 2nd and 3rd stanza, which increases the pace of the poem at this point.
‘the all-way disintegration’ shows us that the nature world and the human world have come together.
He thinks they ‘were waiting’ for him ‘To remember the password and sign”. Hughes thinks that the world of nature is waiting, and the deer are the door to that world.
The password again indicates that there is a sort of secret society of nature, making the confrontation seem magical, mystical and enchanting.
‘the curtain had blown aside for a moment
And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road’
This is when both worlds overlap and all the boundaries & roads seem to disappear.
Hughes’ chooses to describe the boundary as a curtain which tells us that he believes the world of nature is accessible.
‘The deer had come for me.’ This line is placed as a single stanza by itself because this is what the whole poem was leading up to. The deer are the guardians of nature and they’ve come to meet him, or to show him their world.
Similar to ‘The Thought-Fox’, once the deer completes their mission, to show Hughes the world of nature, it rapidly returns back to its secret world like ‘the dark hole of the head’ in ‘The Thought –Fox’.
Hughes again uses compound words to describe the surroundings such as the ‘snow-lonely field’ showing us that the fields were covered completely with a blanket of snow.
The deer run into the fields ‘Towards tree dark’ which could mean that they disappear into the woods and also the dark. They seem to disappear completely leaving no signs behind. All evidence of the deer is taken away, ‘The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well’
The alliteration used in ‘boil of big flakes’ gives a sense of the enormity of snow.
When Hughes loses sight of the deer, everything turns ‘Back to the ordinary.’ He feels inspired to return to his own world having had an incredible encounter.
Both poems use the theme of nature to show us how powerful the natural world can be whether you’re experiencing it (in Roe-Deer) or imagining it (in The Thought-Fox). The surroundings can be compared to things that humans do in their everyday lives.