"Something else is alive/ Beside the clock's loneliness/ And this blank page where my fingers move."
In the poem's first lines, the speaker establishes the poem's setting, mood, and conflict. First, we know the speaker is alone, and that it's late at night, and that he's yet to make any progress on the writing he hoped to complete. In the second stanza, the poem's mood will grow ambiguously sinister: it's unclear if the speaker's intuition that "Something else is alive/ Beside the clock's loneliness" expresses eagerness, anxiety, dread, or some combination of these feelings. The alliteration of "s" sounds and stressed syllables creates a slow, steady pace, much like the fox the speaker will later see delicately wandering among the forest's trees and stumps. Additionally, this "something else" the speaker senses hints at the idea brewing in his mind— even though only its outlines are visible—as well as its concrete correlate, the fox who soon appear beyond his window.
"...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."
Towards the end of the poem, the speaker hones in on the fox's eye, likening its "widening deepening greenness" to the sudden poetic abundance the fox's image provokes. The slow, steady pace established in the first lines continues through the end of stanza 5, then rapidly accelerates, echoing the "sudden sharp hot stink of fox" which strikes the speaker as the fox is merely "Coming about its own business." By stressing the image of the eye with several adjectives and adverbs, the speaker draws out this moment, as though searching for the right combination of words to spark the poem he wishes to write. Additionally, the fox's two meanings converge in the first two lines of stanza 6: the fox is both animal and idea, entering the "dark hole" of the speaker's head.
