Davies' successful strategy in this poem is to first build our rapport with the main character as a fox, letting us feel what she feels, through direct sensory description without commentary. We barely register the shift from a naturalistic depiction to an anthropomorphized one ("somewhere she knows/That once she was loved, but it comes and goes") because we have already made the
imaginative leap of seeing the world through a fox's eyes.
This in turn generates empathy for the woman for whom the fox is a metaphor, the one with matted hair and gaps in her memory, who sleeps on park benches. She is not one of us humans, so we walk past her, or worse ("the shouting of boys flinging cans in the dark"). But an animal consciousness is easier to fall into than we'd like to admit; we've done it just by reading this poem. Davies suggests that the hardscrabble little fox may be the spirit of a young woman who suffered a premature accidental death. Here, the kinship of human and animal speaks to our common vulnerability to forces we cannot comprehend. The fox is making her way through a harsh city environment that is not designed for her, from which she snatches crumbs of sustenance, and whose larger patterns her brain is not equipped to perceive. Is that really so different from how
human beings feel, in the face of the mysteries of life and death?