As Christmas Eve arrives, let’s take a moment away from the frantic and frenzied preparations for the holiday season and relax with Thomas Hardy’s evocative poem, The Oxen.
The Oxen
Written in 1915, Hardy was inspired to write this poem after sitting one Christmas Eve with other folk by the fire. They imagined the scene on the night that Jesus was born in a stable, surrounded by animals – ox and ass. As if recognising that this was a special birth, the animals knelt at the baby’s crib in homage. But, as if in keeping with the forlorn spirit of the age Hardy introduces a note of world weariness – surely few folk would nowadays believe that such a thing might happen? And yet, sounding a tone of eternal optimism, he states how, if someone were to suggest that ox and ass were kneeling today in homage to the birth of the king, he would willingly make his way to the barn hoping it to be true.
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.
