Today’s Poem: The Oxen

Andrea Previtali, Nativity, c. 1517 (Web Gallery of Art)

The Oxen

by Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
    “Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
    By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
    They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
    To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
    In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
    “Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
    Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
    Hoping it might be so.
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There’s a temptation I feel to name “The Oxen” the greatest — the most affecting, the most powerful — Christmas poem ever written.

That’s a weakness in me, I realize: an emotional judgment that sets the poem above, say, Christina Rossetti’s “In the bleak midwinter” (1872) or Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” (1595) or any of a half dozen other classics. The poem spoke to me when I first encountered it as a young teenager, and I’ve not escaped the spell that places it somewhere near the core of memory, somewhere near the center of that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea.

But perhaps it’s not as inappropriate it may seem to think of the poem emotionally and as bound to a particular set of memories, for the lines are very much a creation of their time. Publishing the poem in a 1915 issue of the Times of London, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) gave expression to a certain mood about the folkways of Christianity — and even Christianity itself — that had been building in the English-speaking world for some time.

Among major works, we could trace it back to, say, Matthew Arnold’s 1867 “Dover Beach,” with its melancholy about the withdrawal of the Sea of Faith that had once girdled the world in a decent drapery of meaning. But the mood predates that mid-Victorian work and lasted well into the 20th century. (See, for example, the curiously melancholy ending Philip Larkin (1922–1985) gave his 1954 “Church Going.”)

As it happens, Larkin is as responsible as anyone for the revival of the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Hardy is still best known as a novelist, but he thought of himself primarily as a poet, and the revival of his poetry has led to a new appreciation by modern poets with a formalist interest. Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we’ve already looked at Hardy’s “The Rejected Member’s Wife,” The Convergence of the Twain,” and “A Light Snow-Fall After Frost.”

But “The Oxen” remains one his best-known poems — and it is replete with the late Victorian/Edwardian sense of ambivalence about, and nostalgia for, a time when acceptance of faith seemed easier. A time when the world was thick with magic, and doubts were decided by a trust in the possibility of miracles.

An 1893 potrait of Thomas Hardy (Wikimedia Commons)

Written in four quatrains of common meter, rhymed 4-foot lines alternating with rhymed 3-foot lines, the poem draws on an old Christmas legend from England’s West Country. The legend claims that the domestic animals that were near the manger in Bethlehem have passed down through the centuries the memory of that glory. And every Christmas Eve at midnight the animals kneel again in their stalls in homage to the newborn king. In Hardy’s poem, one of the old generation of a family around a farmhouse fire mentions, at midnight, that the animals are kneeling.

“So fair a fancy few would weave / In these years,” the poet says, and “Yet, I feel . . . ” Well, what does he feel in the rush of emotional memory that Christmas brings? That if someone suggested going to see, he would go to see — even now, in adulthood, breathing the cynicism about Christianity in his generation, “Hoping it might be so.”

Nativity by an unknown Mexican artist, c. 1680 (Athena Art Foundation)

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