My Favourite Christmas Poem – Eleanor Porter

My favourite Christmas poem is Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’. It alludes to an old belief that on Christmas night  – or in some places Twelfth Night – at midnight, animals were given the gift of speech.  I drew on it in The Wheelwright’s Daughter when Martha, on Christmas Eve night, enters a bull’s stall and believes she hears him talk.

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.

I drew on other Christmas traditions in my story too; the custom, for example, of bringing in a great yule log, sometimes a huge piece of trunk, to burn in the manor. Villagers would decorate it and process with it into the hall. Working people would thread holly and mistletoe through spinning wheels and other tools to bring luck and to show no work would be done on the holy day.

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