A man stands on a winter hillside and a fox stands opposite him, and for sixteen lines neither moves. Nothing happens, and yet by the end the poem has turned an animal encounter into an uncomfortable piece of self-knowledge. I. L. Salomon's "The Fox" is about recognition: the speaker looks into the fox's "wary blaze" and sees a reflection of his own capacity for cunning and malice.
The poem sets up a standoff, then complicates it. In the first stanza the fox is described from outside, as something dangerous and alien: "incursive," "islanded in solitude," with fire in its eyes. But the sentence that holds the stanza together is a symmetrical one: the fox "kept his stance as I my own," with "chaos in him as in me." The grammar already insists on equality. By the second stanza the speaker has stopped pretending to be the innocent observer. The fox has "malice," but the speaker too has "infected will" and has "set my trap, a stratagem / As secretive as his own skill." Both are hunters, and both are hiding their intentions. The line "The semblance of his evil, mine; / Mine as his" is the hinge of the poem. Its crossed repetition of "his" and "mine" turns the two figures into mirror images, and the word "semblance" leaves a useful ambiguity: is the fox's evil only a resemblance of the speaker's, or the speaker's only a resemblance of the fox's? The poem will not say which.
The sound of the poem does much of the work of building that mirror. Look at how many words begin with a vowel and carry the stress on the first syllable: "Incursive," "Islanded," "Aorta," "Absolute." These are hard, formal, slightly Latinate words, and they give the poem a cold, hushed texture. "Islanded in solitude" is a striking phrase because it makes the white hillside into a sea, with the fox marooned at the centre of it. The choice of "aorta" is more startling still. Most poems of this kind would reach for "heart." Salomon picks the main artery instead, and sets it in an "inviolate" space "shut in" and "stinging icily." The word suggests that the chaos is not romantic feeling but something physical and pressurised, blood held under tension in the cold. It also quietly places the speaker's body and the fox's in the same imagery, since the "aorta" is shared between them in the syntax.
The form is tight and quietly controlled. Each stanza has eight short lines of mostly four stresses, and the rhymes are subtle rather than chiming: "snow" and "own," "me" and "icily," "will" and "skill," "numb" and "come." Several of these are half-rhymes or rhymes separated by a line, so that the sound arrives with a slight delay, like a footstep placed carefully on ice. The measured regularity mirrors the standoff itself: nothing rushes, nothing breaks. That is why the ending lands so cleanly. In the "numb / Absolute of silence" the fox "Disappeared as he had come," in a line so plain and so quick that it feels like a door closing. The enjambment of "numb / Absolute" is worth noticing: the sentence leans over the line break just as the silence leans over the scene.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains. The speaker never says what his trap is, or what his "infected will" has been plotting. The word "infected" suggests something caught rather than chosen, as if malice were a sickness the speaker carries and the fox simply displays openly. By leaving the human side vague, Salomon makes us fill it in with our own cunning, which may be the point. The fox is only a fox, honest in its wariness, while the person on the hillside has to confront the uneasy idea that his stillness is not innocence at all. The animal vanishes, but the recognition stays behind in the snow.