“The Oxen” begins at a precise moment in time: “Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.” It’s the moment the clock strikes midnight on Christmas Eve—and thus the moment that Christmas Eve turns into Christmas Day.
At this moment, the speaker is gathered around the low embers of a fire with a “flock” of friends and family. In their “hearthside ease,” they’re cozy and comfortable together. But there’s a shiver of mystery in this warm scene. For as the clock chimes, one of the “elder[s]” among the group declares: “‘Now they are all on their knees.’” Everyone here, this elder is sure, will know which “they” they’re talking about—though perhaps the reader won’t, at first. The poem’s title gives the clue: the elder is alluding to an old English folk tradition in which oxen are said to kneel reverently to welcome in Christmas Day and the birth of Jesus (who was traditionally said to have arrived on the stroke of midnight).
Right away, then, the poem evokes a world of rural community, shared understanding, and ancient, worn-in traditions. This group of people, readers gather, must sit around the fire to welcome in Christmas morning every year. Someday the young folks will become the elders and tell new generations the story of the kneeling oxen. This is a community linked by steady belief.
The speaker underscores that sense of shared faith by describing the people huddled around the fire as a “flock”—a word that might equally be used to describe a group of birds or sheep and a Christian congregation. The metaphor of people as sheep watched over by a shepherd is an old, old Christian idea (from the biblical description of Christ as the “good shepherd” to the word “pastor,” which means shepherd). Here, the metaphor of the flock connects the people inside to the oxen outside in more ways than one. The rural, agricultural world and the world of religious faith interweave: the people are like the oxen, and the oxen know it’s Christmas.
The poem’s shape helps to build this atmosphere of sturdy rural community and old ways. The poem is written in ballad meter: quatrains (or four-line stanzas) that alternate between lines of four beats and lines of three, like so:
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
The same old form often turns up in folk songs and nursery rhymes. This poem, telling a story about the telling of a story, itself sounds like part of a folk tradition.
The speaker’s language, though, is a little more delicate than one might expect from a folk song. The nostalgic vision of “hearthside ease” and the elder’s precisely reported words are more like something out of a novel than a ballad. This little incongruity is the first hint of a tension between earthy tradition and the era in which this poem was written: the early 20th century, not long after the outset of World War I.