The festive season has rolled down the roads in all its pomp and splendour! Stars and trees have added a glimmer and shimmer in towns and villages. The rhythmic drumbeat and harmony of carols resonate in every heart. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the three wise men, shepherds and the angels weave Christmas stories every year.
Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Oxen’, which was published in The Times on December 24, 1915, reflects on the transition from innocence to disillusionment during the war years. But on Christmas Eve, the poet yearns to hope and believe, amidst all the chaos.
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.
The elder narrates the Christmas tale to the young ones. They picture the animals kneeling in the stable at the birth of Jesus.
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
The children accept without question the kneeling of the oxen then, and the lines end abruptly.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years!
‘These years’ refer to the First World War when the poem was published. At such a time, not even children would opt to believe in the cattle kneeling at the stable. Faith in humanity and hope for the future were lost, with the death toll on the rise and humans being slaughtered like cattle.
Yet the poet says that even in such a harsh time, if someone tells him that the cattle are kneeling ‘in the lonely barton by yonder coomb’ on Christmas eve,
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
Hardy strives to light a flicker of hope in such detested times at the end of the poem. The spirit of Christmas encompasses love, joy, hope and peace. Our childhood used to know.
The poet seems to emphasise that amidst the bloodshed and violence, one can march into the gloom with a heart which remembers what the childhood used to know- to trust, to have faith and to be hopeful.
The writer is a poet, translator and assistant professor of English at BCM College, Kottayam