A Christmas Poem

Writing Plans for 2025

As the year comes to its end I want to thank you for being here with me in 2024. Having an audience, having a readership, is essential for a writer. Knowing that my words are read or heard, liked or commented on, means a great deal. So, thank you.

I also want you be to be among the first to know that I have plans for publishing my memoir, Handmade, here on Substack, hopefully in the spring of 2025, and with the support of my publisher Linen Press. I will have much more to say about this in January, and about how I intend to use this opportunity to do some small good in the world.

In the meantime, I offer you thoughts on a Christmas poem, written in 1915 and yet for me still resonant - from one of my favourite writers Thomas Hardy…

Any soldier in the trenches in 1915 who happened to read a copy of The Times for 24th December might have seen Thomas Hardy’s poem The Oxen. It was first published in this edition and printed alongside news of the devastating conflict that was ravaging Europe. It appeared alongside an advertisement for Bovril -which claimed to give strength to the men in the trenches!

When I was seventeen, I was given this poem by my English teacher to read aloud at the Christmas Carol Service. I learned it by heart and every Christmas Eve without fail it comes back to me. I didn’t know until recently when and where it was first published, or that ‘in these years’ referred to the years of the Great War. I hadn’t fully grasped its context. But I instinctively felt its poignancy and its darkness, and I understood the folk traditions from which it came which meant so much to Hardy. I loved its language: the comfort of words like ‘combe’ which were a part of my West Country heritage. I understood the desire for something hopeful, something to believe in.

Now it seems as poignant to me as it did then, perhaps even more so. In many ways 2024 has been a dark year on the global stage; another year of war in Ukraine, the devastation in Gaza, the return of populism in the U.S. So I offer you this beautiful poem in a small act of remembrance and hope.

Have a happy and peaceful Christmas wherever you are and whatever you do.

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.

Thomas Hardy

Thanks for reading

(and thank you to those who commented on my last post about keeping a journal. I wanted to reply but I can no longer find the comments!)

Avril x