This poem is based on a folk belief that oxen kneel every Christmas as they knelt in the manger where Christ was born (barton, by the way, is a farmyard and coomb is a valley.)
The English poet Thomas Hardy wrote "The Oxen" in 1916. Son of a church stonemason in a very religious family (he considered taking Holy Orders), he left his village home for London when he was 22 to study the latest in church architecture. While there, he began reading books he'd had no access to before. Among others, he read Charles Darwin's study of evolution and T.H. Huxley's and Herbert Spencer's works setting forth their philosophies of scientific rationalism. In the light of these new understandings, his orthodox faith was shattered.
The storm raised by Darwin, Huxley and Spencer raged onward through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th and by the time Hardy wrote "The Oxen," a new storm had begun: Europe was in the midst of the conflagration of World War I. Like many, he was in utter despair about the state of the world.
I find Hardy's poem very contemporary, as the best poems always are. The best poems find a timeless center of human feeling and articulate it beyond doctrine, beyond dogma, beyond local circumstance, beyond the individual speaker.
But to do that, such poems always remain specific, located in time and place. There's a real voice in Hardy's poem, a real person remembering his childhood. He remembers sitting with other children by the fireside at midnight, listening wide-eyed to the adults tell them that the animals are kneeling now in their "strawy pen." You're there. You can see it. As a child, Hardy believed it completely.
But then the adult voice comes in, recognizing that no one in 1916 could believe this story anymore. And yet, he says, if someone asked him now to go see, he'd go, hoping it might be so. The hope in this poem is fragile -- a "fancy" someone might "weave."
But it is hope. It comes in the dark of night during the darkest days of the year, at what appeared to Hardy to be the darkest gloom of history. Notice that he end-rhymes "coomb" and "gloom," making us hear a sound like a person mourning.
I love how he ends the poem with "so" -- the open-mouthed vowel, like a child's mouth open with wonder.
But it isn't a sentimental wonder, as in TV commercials for kids' toys. It's a hope that you feel has been hard-won from the gloom. It's an adult hope, a deliberate decision to remain hopeful.
Fleda Brown, of Traverse City, is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. You can learn more about her on her Web site, fledabrown.com.
The Oxen
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.
-- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
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