Fleet (Thought-)Foxes

I was a fan of the Fleet Foxes video, Austin. There was something very Coleridgean about it, wasn't there? It could have been filmed in a claymation Xanadu: rivers, birds, magic mushrooms...and then the whole thing gets interrupted when the man lets go of the wheel. The person from Porlock probably startled him.

Now, the gothic side of Coleridge might have actually changed the song lyrics so that the neck-scarves came untied and the heads literally fell into the snow, then stared with wide-open eyes.

There may have been a little Wordsworth there, too. Compare these lines:

Fleet Foxes:

And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in the summertime.

Wordsworth:

From day to day, to Michael's ear there came
Distressful tidings.

And, in the summer-time when days are long,
I will come hither with my Paramour;
And with the dancers and the minstrel's song
We will make merry in that pleasant bower.

Hmmmmmmmmm......VERY interesting :)

Oh, and FYI, a much later British poet, Ted Hughes, compares the kind of thoughts that lead to poetry--indeed the very act of writing poetry--to a fox. I hope we have time for some Hughes when we get into March and April. He is amazing.

The Thought-Fox

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.