Xmas Poems
CHRISTMAS
POEMS
His beams shall cheer my breast, and
both so twine,
Till ev'n his beams sing, and my
musick shine.
--GEORGE
HERBERT
THOMAS HARDY
published "The Oxen" in the London Times on December 24, 1915. He
based the poem on the traditional legend of oxen kneeling in their stables at midnight
on Christmas Eve, which he first heard from his mother. He may also have
recalled the carving of "a kneeling bovine" that he saw as a youth
when he was working as an architect's apprentice on the restoration of
Rampisham Church.
Hardy always associated the supernatural with the celebration
of Christmas. I feel that in this poem he envied the people who sat comfortably
in a Christian "flock" and never doubted the veracity of the tale of
the kneeling animals. He had been one of them once. But, in the midst of World
War I, which cast, as he said, "a shade over everything," that faith
was forever denied him.
"The Oxen" is written, appropriately enough, in the
common meter of the ballad stanza. It has a rustic English vocabulary (a
"barton" is a farmyard, a "coomb" a valley) that
reverberates with Christian overtones. There is a keen element of childish
wonder in the poem, which he included in his book Moments of Vision (1917). Many years later, when Hardy was asked to
choose twelve of his own poems for the library of Queen Mary's quirky doll's
house, "The Oxen" was his first choice. His eyesight was too weak to
manage it, but otherwise he would have transcribed the poem in miniature in his
own handwriting.
Here, then,
is my favorite Christmas Eve poem:
THE OXEN
Christmas
Eve, and the twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder
said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearths ide 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.
Hardy's poem
is also collected in Christmas Poems,
an erudite little anthology selected and edited by John Hollander and J. D.
McClatchy. The editors point out that Christmas is both a holiday and a holy
day, which has always been associated with poetry. Their garland traces a dramatic
arc from the Annunciation to the Epiphany, and reaches a pinnacle in a sublime
group of poems that centers on the Nativity, including pieces by John Milton,
John Donne, Henry Vaughan, Christopher Smart, and T. S. Eliot. It contains
requisite poems, songs, and carols everyone recognizes, such as ''A Visit from
St. Nicholas" and "The Twelve Days of Christmas," as well as
lesser-known but equally enchanting lyrics, such as this elegant little
"Epiphany" by Robert Fitzgerald, which consists of one sentence
strung across two rhyming quatrains:
Unearthly
lightning of presage
In any dark
day's iron age
May come to
lift the hair and bless
Even our
tired earthliness,
And sundown
bring an age of gold,
Forged in
faery, far and old,
An elsewhere
and an elfin light,
And kings
rise eastward in the night.
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