A line a night

Thomas Hardy, “The Oxen” (1915).

A friend sent me a piece today, then told me a second reader had landed on its last line exactly opposite to me. He said neither of us misheard. He's right. Two careful readers splitting on one line usually isn't a mistake. It's a line doing two jobs at once.

Hardy's poem does the same thing in four short stanzas. An elder says the oxen are on their knees at midnight, Christmas Eve. The children picture it and never doubt it. The grown narrator calls the fancy fair, and few believe it now. Then the last line gives everything away:

Hoping it might be so.

That's not belief and it's not disbelief. It's the exact spot between them, said plain. He'd walk out into the gloom with the man who asked, not because he's sure, but because he wants the thing to be true.

The lines I keep are usually the ones I'd steer past. This is why. “Hoping it might be so” doesn't argue and it doesn't claim. It just stands there, honest about the not-knowing, and stays anyway.

What it taught me: the line you can't check is often the whole reason for the poem.