Take us the little foxes
On fox poems, real and imaginary
Bright pink smear of sky over an ice cold London, one face of the Shard shining blue like a strip of satin. I don’t like the Shard. It looms over the suburbs below the river, poking its point out from behind every terrace. I don’t like how it dominates the skyline either. But in certain lights, I’ll take it.
"Good morning, beautiful."
I turn around.
"Not you, the fox. Stay there, beautiful, I'll get you some food."
The fox is waiting in front of the lacklusture laurel bush behind the basketball court. The dog and I see this fox most mornings. There was a time when the dog would have chased it, but these days he doesn’t bother. And the fox is beautiful, though I’d never stopped to think about it in those terms, a very healthy looking fox, with a shock of chesnut fur, thick as a ruff or whatever it is draped over Mark Rylance’s shoulders in the new series of “Wolf Hall”.
There are quite a few well-fed foxes round here. Last winter, when I was still getting the train into work, I would see one waiting beneath the same ground-floor window every evening. The light was on and you could hear people talking and cooking inside, the scrape of pans. The fox would sit very patiently on a patch of grass, paws folded over one another like a dog by a fire. The grass itself seemed to take on the outline of a room. We think of domestication as a movement inwards - the animal steps through the door - but I’m not sure it’s like that, at least not in a city. A city is a house already.
In street below our street there’s a unit making anti-corrosion paint. The steel drums are out in the elements, walkways in the air, buckets at their base with signs like “waste oil”. The other morning, I saw a fox weaving between the drums. This one didn’t look so healthy. Its coat was rusting, almost grey. No one feeds this fox, though it must live within metres of “beautiful”.
One of the earliest mentions of foxes in poetry must be in The Song of Songs, a genuinely erotic poem which somehow sneaked its way into the Tanakh and subsequently the Bible. One lover is speaking to another:
“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”
This is the King James version; take means catch. The foxes need catching because they’re going to eat the grapes, which besides being, as Miles Burrows puts it, good advice for "market gardeners” is simply an admittedly extreme extension of the poem’s central conceit: spring is here and so we better be about our business. But take is so much better than catch. The poem is all about pleasure, abudance, desire: take almost reads as though the foxes are being scooped up along with the grapes and the figs. They are, after all, only little.
We were sleeping on rugs a little way from the jeep, in a makeshift square bordered by bags. The fire had gone out, but there was no need of any shelter, except perhaps from the stars themselves, which were terrifyingly near. It was March 2011 and I was travelling with friends. We had meant to go through Syria, but when the time came Egypt seemed like the safer option.
We were in the White Desert, a surreal expanse of dunes and mushroom-like rocks near the border with Libya. Our driver had warned us about the foxes, but it still wasn’t pleasant to hear them shuffling and sniffing around in the dark. Every time I rolled over, I saw something small duck behind the wheels of the car. With your eyes closed, they seemed nearer. Soon, as the others fell asleep, they really were: weaving between the bags, brushing against toes. Somehow, heroically, I slept. When I woke, the desert was green and so was the sky. The moon was full and the stars were gone. The foxes were there, too, a little way off, with green eyes.
They were back in the morning, playing further off. In the sunlight they were adorable. I think they were Fennecs, the smallest species of fox, but they might have been Rüppell's, which are more closely related to our Red Fox. Presumably the little foxes in The Song of Songs are one or the other, too.
Before leaving, we followed the foxes to their den behind a small dune, which can’t have been more than a few metres from our camp. There was a single sock on the sand below the entrance (later we discovered that many more were missing). At the time, I imagined it was all coincidence: we were hours from anywhere and happened to park next to them. Presumably, though, the driver parked there every other night and that’s why the den was there.
Contemporary poetry is full of foxes and this must be because contemporary poets see them all the time. They are the closest that many of us come to meeting a wild animal. Often, the foxes in these poems are endowed with a kind of mystical quality. Through the encounter, the poet accesses a wilder part of themselves which had been lying dormant. That wildness sits a little uneasily with the fox’s sheer ubiquity. It’s our wildness, not theirs.
The most famous example I can think of, Ted Hughes’s “Thought Fox”, is a very deliberate piece of self-mythologising, though Hughes’s fox lives in the forest (he was remembering Yorkshire). The story you hear at Pembroke, Hughes’s old Cambridge college, is that he wrote it while sitting up one night looking over the old court, bored stiff of essay writing. One version of this myth says that there was a real fox crossing the court. The myth also claims to know which ‘starless’ window he wrote it by. I don’t like “The Thought Fox”, but then I don’t really like any of Hughes’s animal poems. It’s his wildness, not theirs.
One Sunday in the pub the dog was bothering a couple eating their lunch more than he usually bothers people eating. It turned out they had a whole steak under a napkin. Understandably, the dog thought it was going to waste.
“Oh, it’s not for you dear, we’re saving it for the foxes.”
Google, apparently, is broken, but old habits die hard. If you search something along the lines of “poems about foxes” one of the first sites you find is this one: “Famous Poems Celebrating the Enigmatic Fox”. The fact the page has its own contents section should set alarm bells ringing, as should the absence of any poems about hunting. There follows a series of poems by famous poets, none of which I recognise besides Hughes’s Thought-Fox.
The first is attributed, rather insultingly, to R. L. Stevenson, but anyone who has ever asked ChatGPT to write poetry will recognise the style:
His eyes, like amber, gleam and shine, As he weaves through the undergrowth's entwine, A vision of nature's art.With every step, he marks his trail, Leaving behind a secret, untold tale, Of his wild and cunning heart.
Next, we have a poem by “D. H. Lawrence”, which begins:
The red fox crosses the ice intent on none of my business. It's winter and slim pickings. I stand in the bushy cemetery, pretending to watch birds, but really watching the fox who could care less. She paused on the sheer glare of the pond. She knows I'm here, sniffs me in the wind...
This is slightly more convincing, but the vocabularly is odd (“slim pickings” feels unlikely) and the reference to the Thought-Fox in the second line (“coming about its own business”) is impossible. It turns out this is the beginning of a real poem, “Red Fox”, by Margaret Atwood.
Where the rest of the “Lawrence” poem comes from, though, is a mystery:
and suddenly goes slanting east. That's that. Alone again, whatever that may mean. My word! It's a cold morning in drafts of frigid wind but the sun is high, the sky is blue, the sparrows are building their nests, and the fox goes bounding along.
Google didn’t know either, though it kept directing me to Wordsworth. I think, heretically, I marginally prefer the fake poem to Atwood’s (though it’s slim pickings). “That’s that” builds on the briskness of the first few lines, where the original rambles on to no great end. But obviously that doesn’t excuse the theft.
It’s all very strange. Cunning, even. There are poems by “Mary Oliver”, by “e e cummings” and by “Ogden Nash”. Did someone ask the AI for those poets in particular? Or did the machine choose them? It would be funny if it wasn’t so bleak: I’ve since seen someone share the “Stevenson” poem on their own blog. If we had any sense we would burn the internet down and start again.
It is hard to think of a less contemporary poet than Walter de la Mare, which I don’t mean as a criticsm. This is ‘Alone’, a title he used more than once:
The abode of the nightingale is bare, Flowered frost congeals in the gelid air, The fox howls from his frozen lair: Alas, my loved one is gone, I am alone: It is winter. Once the pink cast a winy smell, The wild bee hung in the hyacinth bell, Light in effulgence of beauty fell: Alas, my loved one is gone, I am alone: It is winter. My candle a silent fire doth shed, Starry Orion hunts o'erhead; Come moth, come shadow, the world is dead: Alas, my loved one is gone, I am alone: It is winter.
The first two lines are wonderfully chilly (you don’t hear gelid very often), but it’s only when the fox howls that you really feel the cold. I didn’t realise this at first, but the fox is more than an image: the refrain could be a response to the scene, but it might also be the fox’s cry returning. I think we can read it both ways. Unlike Hughes’s Thought Fox, who is thought first, de la Mare uses the fox to his own ends, while also leaving him out in the cold. Not wild. Just fox.
probably de la Mare's greatest poem