The Oxen

KEY CONTEXT - written in 1915

• Hardy = 75 years old - had experienced a lot of loss

• mass urbanisation

• compulsory education

• mass industrialisation

• increasing secularisation of society

• changing rural habits and traditions

• hardy himself had moved from faith into a more uncertain semi-atheistic belief

• mass killings of WW1

Hardy quote on animals and equality and Darwinian analysis vs Christian

“all organic creatures are of one family” - 1910 writing to animal charities

• Darwinian - all come from one species suggesting that with atheism comes an understanding for animals

• Whereas Christianity stresses a separation between animals and humanity - relating to the dominionship the bible gives humans over the world

Wordsworthian ruralism

• seen in Hardy’s poetry

• displays a deep feeling for rustic society and for landscape

What does the meter reflect

• variation in meter

• echoes conflict and uncertainty alongside consistent double meaning

Claire Tomalin AO5 quote

“muses on his lack of faith and his regret for it”

Adam Newey AO5

“the grown man believes that if there us any transcendent power at work in this world it is callously indifferent to human concern”

“burdened by inescapable memory”

Geoffrey Harvey AO5

“creates his own spiritual values in the face of the awful inexorability of time by a supreme act of poetic will”

“The Oxen”

a domesticated animal kept to fulfil human needs

“Christmas Eve, and the twelve of the clock.”

• evoking feelings of nostalgia, comfort and tradition through the time of the setting

• end stopped lined reinforcing the certainty of the setting

“‘Now they are all on their knees,’”

• Elder speaking - an authoritative figure, religious figure? - judgemental?

• symbolising rural tradition which are dying out

“we sat in a flock”

we - collective

flock:

• aligning humans with animals yet the animals are shut outside

• metaphor

• sympathising tone towards the plight of animals

• communal

“By the embers in hearthside ease.”

• nostalgic, comforting, communal setting

• suggesting that the past even if faint can be revisited

“We pictured the meek mild creatures where/ they dwelt in their strawy pen:”

• a false construction

• characterising the vulnerability of the animals

• biblical allusion to the bible “the meek shall inherit the earth”- this would’ve been a hymn that Hardy sang as a child

• Jesus born in a pen aligning the animals with Christ through biblical allusions

What do the religious allusions suggest

• lots of religious allusion vs Hardy’s loss of faith, perhaps highlighting the hypocritical nature of religion

• and the nostalgia which comes from the comfort of religion - wanting to return to safe comforting state

• Or critical of religion - through Darwinism - the mindless belief that comes with religion

“we pictured” “a fancy few would weave”

semantic field of construction - falseness

“a fancy few”

fricative alliteration - judgemental tone

“Yet, I feel,”

Volta of the poem

• I - first person pronoun including the reader in revelation

“‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb”

• Wordsworthian ruralism - personifying farm as a distant rural world - no community anymore, lost world -distant

• “Yonder coomb” - specific phrase only exists in the west of England, meaning distant valley

“I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.”

“should … might”

• suggesting hesitance through modal verbs

• desire to return to the past

“him”

• the oxen

• prioritising nature, nature bowed down to Christ so now it is time for humans to prioritise nature

“gloom”

• evoking darkness giving the poem a cyclical structure

• rural life does not exist in natural form anymore - now a gloom

“Hoping it might be so.”

• stressing this want to reverse enlightenment, go back to mindlessness

• end-stopped line, giving his decision a finality and peaceful quality

Tone

elegiac and hymnal