Response to hardy
"The Oxen” poem was written by Thomas Hardy.
He wrote it when he was 75 years old, so this poem is a memory of his childhood
especially on the Christmas day. He wrote about the traditions in the past in
celebrating this day. The children would have been allowed to sit up late to
welcome the start of Christmas Day, and the older members of the family would
have told them stories. Young children tend to believe what they are told,
hence the final two lines of the second stanza. Every child sitting by the fire
would have had a picture in their mind’s eye of the cattle kneeling to pray,
without asking themselves whether this was really likely to be the case.
However, by remembering such traditions, he found many differences at the
present time. Maybe, people now abandoned formal religion and traditional
Christian beliefs, and retained only some belief in the supernatural things.
Therefore, this poem might be written about contradictions between past and
present.
This is really
a worth poem to read. It always reminds us of the memories of the past, and how
things are totally changed now. We can feel the changes through the elder`s
stories. That what happen to me when I hear my mother`s stories. I feel how
people were friendly, helpful, caring for each other and have the cooperative
spirits. I feel their powerful energy to get up from the dawn to be ready for
their works. I feel how lovely and beautiful village the live in. I feel the
magnificent traditions they used to do at every ceremony. All of those amazing
feelings, we lose today. People became more materialistic. Thus they are
selfish and all what they care of is themselves. Traditions were faded away,
and hardly we hear some of whom stick to it. Everything has changed now, which
make us sail into our memories to feel the harmony of the past.
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