Ox Cart Man

“Ox Cart Man” is a five-stanza, free verse poem of 25 lines by poet Donald Hall. Originally published in The New Yorker magazine in 1977, “Ox Cart Man” later inspired one of Hall’s children’s books—Ox Cart Man, published in 1979. With syntax and line breaks that mimic the plodding sense of labor and travel, Hall’s short poem examines ideas of work, meaning, satisfaction, and reward.

The straightforward diction and simple phrases of “Ox Cart Man” are hallmarks of Hall’s poetic style. Using a seemingly simple metaphor, Hall deftly crafts images that resonate outward, expanding the reach of the poem to encompass larger philosophical ideas of the cyclical nature of the human world, and how humans seek meaning and gain value from banal daily labors. Following the tasks of an unnamed man across a month’s work of work, Hall humanizes and universalizes the figure, quietly suggesting that the reader find small moments of satisfaction in their own work cycles too.

Poet Biography

Poet Laureate Donald Hall was born in 1928. He grew up in Connecticut and spent summers on his great-grandparents’ farm in New Hampshire, an experience that would help shape his poetic sensibilities. Hall published his first poem at 16; that year he also attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at the young age of 16, where he met Robert Frost. Hall went on to Harvard, studying poetry with giants of the genre including John Ashbery and Adriene Rich, and then to Oxford. Upon his return to the United States, he taught at schools including Stanford and Harvard, and edited the journal Paris Review. In 1955 he published his first collection, Exiles and Marriages. In 1963, he won the first of two Guggenheim fellowships.

Hall moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1957 to teach at the University of Michigan. He met Jane Kenyon, a student in his class and a fellow poet. In the 1970s, the two married; the family moved to Hall’s family farm in New Hampshire when Hall’s grandmother died. In 1984, Hall became the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. Throughout the 70s and 80s, he published numerous poetry collections, essays, memoirs, stories, children’s books, biographies, and textbooks; during this time, he won multiple honors and awards, including a nomination for the National Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Critics noted Hall’s ability to write simply and evocatively, conveying the experience of rural New England. Fellow poet laureate Billy Collins wrote:

Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines. (“Donald Hall.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets)

In 1989, Hall was diagnosed with colon cancer; although the prognosis was poor, he recovered. In 1996, his wife Jane passed away after battling leukemia. Hall’s subsequent work, especially the collections Without: Poems in 1998 and The Painted Bed in 2002, dealt plainly and intensely with the experience of her death and his grief.

In 2006, Hall became Poet Laureate of the United States; in 2010, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of the Arts. Hall continued to write and live at Eagle Pond Farm until his death on June 23, 2018.

Poem Text

Hall, Donald. “Ox Cart Man.” 1977. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Ox Cart Man” begins in October, as the speaker describes the actions of an unnamed man, presumably living somewhere in the rural New Hampshire, as he “counts potatoes dug from the brown field” (Line 2) and evaluates which to keep for seed, which to keep for his home cellar, and which to bag up and place in his cart.

The poem next describes all the items the man also packs in the cart, including wool that he had sheared the previous spring, honeycomb, linens, leather that he has tanned from deer hide, and vinegar in a barrel that he crafted himself. Once the cart is packed, the man walks in tandem with his ox for ten days until he reaches the Portsmouth Market. Hall then enumerates all the things the man sells there, from his potatoes to the bags that carried them, as well as “flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose / feathers, yarn” (Lines 14-15). Once the man has sold everything in the cart, he sells his cart, and then his ox, harness and yoke, so that he must walk home alone, with “his pockets heavy / with the year’s coin for salt and taxes” (Lines 19-20).

In the final stanza, the man sits in front of the fire during the November cold, as he begins to create a new harness for the following year’s trip, one that he will place on the young ox currently in the barn. The poem ends on the image of the man carving the yolk and sawing the planks, “building the cart again” (Line 25), which he will use to repeat the cycle the following October.