The Christmas stable — the stall where Christ was born in the most theologically charged deployment of this agricultural word — transforms the individual animal's sleeping place into the setting for the event that divides history; A poet might write "the horse stood in his stall with the patience of a creature whose world is entirely present — no past to regret, no future to anticipate, the stall itself the complete circumference of his contentment"; The stall's domestic intimacy — the individual animal in its named space, known and tended — contrasts with the anonymous mass of the herd, and this contrast structures poems about the value of individual attention and particular relationship; In cathedral poetry the stall takes its ecclesiastical meaning — the carved wooden seat of a canon or choir member — and the agricultural and religious meanings create a productive resonance: the cathedral chapter in their stalls as the animals in their byre, each in their place, the institution housing its members as the farm houses its beasts; Shakespeare's "Full many a glorious morning" contrasts the royal and the humble, and the stall appears in his agricultural passages as the image of secured, tended life — the animal in its stall as the subject in the kingdom, contained and protected by an order they did not create; Hardy's farm poems attend to the stall as a space of concentrated pastoral care — the sick animal in its individual space, the farmer's nighttime vigil, the high stakes of the particular creature's fate.