Favourite Poems: The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

Since it's Christmas, here's another of my favourite Christmas poems.

I don't have a whole lot to say about it. It's a simple poem, and its greatness more or less lies in its last two lines.

It's very efficient. I've only noticed now that the first verse wouldn't make any sense without the title. Hardy explains the superstition, and sets the stage, in extraordinarily few words.

I must say I can never remember being as credulous (or lacking in cynicism) as Hardy portrays the company in the second verse.

The last verse, and especially the magnificent last line, always makes me sob. It captures the whole tragedy of disenchantment (not only individual, but social and cultural) in a few syllables. I think it captures it even better than Arnold's famous lines about the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the sea of faith-- although that, too, is magnificent and fully deserves its fame.

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.

Postscript: I've just come across this sad passage, in a Church Times article about Hardy and religion: On his deathbed, in the darkness of midwinter, he requested that the story of Christ’s nativity should be read to him. Afterwards, he pointed out that there was no evidence to support its veracity." 

Sceptics always seem to want everything in the Christian religion to have independent evidence, rather than accepting cumulative or composite evidence. This standard isn't applied to anything else, as far as I can see. A colleague once lamented to me that there were no modern miracles to attest to the supernatural. When I mentioned the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, in 1917, she said: "I mean something more recent, though."

(Apologies for the formatting glitch, but I've spent far too long trying to get rid of it already.)