The Oxen at Christmas

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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.

Many of us brushed up against the pastoral tales of Thomas Hardy in high school and college, I think: Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far From the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure. Hardy grew up Anglican and although he retained a lifelong affection for the church and some of his best friends were ministers, he would probably be best described as an “agnostic Christian.” He lost faith in what he called “the external personality” of the God of his childhood.

But, as most of us do, the longing for the simple faith of our childhoods leaves us wistful, nostalgic. The presents under the tree, the smell of pine, “Jap” oranges and the schoolrooms crowded with parents marveling at the talents of their children re-enacting Luke's description of the birth of the Christchild.

Hardy's The Oxen puts this nostalgia for childhood simplicity of faith into words with which his contemporaries could no doubt relate. Composed in 1915 when WWI was happening, it comes as no surprise that people would be in despair about what Europe was becoming, so much that Hardy is to have said that the West had proved itself incapable of civilized behaviour and that people of colour should be given the opportunity to run the world.

NOTE: A barton is a village; a coomb is a valley. Nostalgia for childhood is logically set in the locale of our childhoods.

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