The two manuscripts now form the nucleus of a remarkable collection of literary and material objects the College has recently assembled relating to its most famous modern literary son.
One is the earliest known manuscript draft of Hughes’ poem ‘Go Fishing’, which was first published in River (first edition 1983). The poem itself has been the subject of a great deal of critical attention from leading Hughes scholars, and in its published form delivers, from its title on, a series of imperatives to its readers that proceed from a lifelong passion for fishing. Fishing was, Hughes said, ‘an opportunity of being truly immersed, turning back into yourself into a good way’; Roy Davids has described its function for Hughes as ‘a royal road into his inner being’. Hughes claimed, at least twice, that he lost the ability to speak when he was fishing; this heavily worked draft gives a unique insight into the means by which he recovered language, and sought to communicate the importance of that experience to others.
'The Thought-Fox' is a manuscript fair copy, dating from 1990 and written out at Roy Davids’ request, of a poem that owes a great deal to a famous dream Hughes had while an undergraduate at Pembroke in the spring of 1953. This dream was of a burnt fox-man that entered his room after he had spent a fruitless evening trying to compose an essay on Samuel Johnson; the dreamed reproach the fox uttered, before laying its bleeding paw on the page, ‘Stop this. You are destroying us’, led him first to abandon the academic study of literary criticism for anthropology and archaeology, and then, two years later, in a London winter, to write what still remains one of his two or three best-known poems. It was first published in The Hawk in the Rain (1957).