THE OXEN:
SO WHAT?

After “Were you raised by baboons?” the question most frequently asked Mr. Poetical is, “How do you decide which poems you’re going to talk about?”

Maybe you assume that, like so many things in this world, bribery is involved. I would like to say that the good folks at Harvard Classics take me to opulent hours-long lunches at exotic Chinese buffets, or that the Poetry Guild sends me regularly to stay in their timeshare in Aruba on a “fact finding mission.” The truth is that I often just pick up old textbooks and thumb through them – those poetry books are full of poems.

“The Oxen” I picked for because it was written by Thomas Hardy. Once, like most people, the only Hardys I knew of in literature were teen sleuth Joe and his younger, blonde brother Frank, who, with the help of their portly yet good-natured chum, Chet, made life miserable for anyone thinking of hiding stolen loot in attics or caves near Bayport.

This third Hardy Boy, Tom, was a great novelist in the 1800s, which was a time when there were a few good novelists and a lot that were could make you cry for mercy before you even reached page 500. In the 1870s, 80s and 90s Thomas Hardy wrote novels like The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge. High school teachers routinely cue up adaptations of Hardy’s novels from the Masterpiece Theatre site and show them in English class, in order to assure that our nation’s youths are getting enough sleep. In their day, though, these books were protested for being too sexy—they had such kinky shenanigans as married people thinking of running off into the woods to meet other married people and make declarations.

So many protestors, including Hardy’s own wife, complained about the sexual content of his novel Jude the Obscure (who?) that Hardy decided in 1895, nuts to this, and he quit writing novels and became a poet, because nobody pays enough attention to poets to protest them. 

His poetry is pretty good, especially since he could have retired to model railroading and still been remembered as a literary giant. He kept living on and on, thirty more years, until people became tired of calling him the venerable standard-bearer of the Victorian novel and just took to calling him Milton Berle. He then went on to conquer vaudeville, radio, and television.

In "The Oxen," a burned-out old shepherd remembers, on Christmas Eve, what it was like to believe in miracles. We know he is old because of the nostalgic way he talks about the barton by the coomb, where he used to hang out when he was a kid. While most of us have left the old barton for good, and never even think about the coomb we used to know, this guy is weepy for them, and would be glad to revisit the barton and/or coomb, if he thought he could catch the animals there observing Christmas like people do, or rather, like they should.

(By the way, a barton is a farm, and a coomb is a valley.)

Anyone who has ever been to a Christmas party and seen their co-workers drunk, or, even worse, trying to be clever by wearing Santa hats, or has ever worked or shopped at a retail store in December, knows what a gut-wrenching thing it would be to see would be animals acting like people at Christmas. To be honest, it's usually so cold at Christmas that Mr. Poetical wouldn't even leave the hearth for the barton or the coomb if you told him the oxen were wearing evening gowns and riding tricycles. It is a measure of this poem's fatalism that its narrator wishes without much hope that he could believe in a Christmas miracle if someone told him about one, but a sign of its greatness that he acknowledges that “So fair a fancy (such a great lie) few would weave in these years!” Yeah! Where are the great bullshitters of today?

Hardy, old pro that he was, created something of a Christmas miracle himself with this poem, when you consider how much ground he covers in such a short space. The first few lines show sheep outside in their pen and shepherds sitting "in a flock" around the fireplace (ha-ha, who’s the cattle now?). There is also another scene, which takes place in the narrator's imagination, of big hairy oxen out in the cold night, turned all gentle and humble by the Christmas spirit. Also, the poem finds room for two quotes, the second one being stretched across that big empty space that separates the last two stanzas.

But the most significant thing is the poem's distinct mood. You don't have to be depressed or lonely to feel this shepherd's sadness, and you don't have to be old to see that he feels that he's lost the ability to appreciate the marvels that once made life zesty. You just have to have fallen, just once, for that kind of nonsense that we lay on kids. Like the story that someone once told me about his grandpa warning him that if you sneeze too hard your pants will fall down (the science is still, as they say, out on this one). If you ever bought into something like that, or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy or the Human Centipede, know that, being smarter now, you lost something when you quit being so gullible.