"Man with a Hoe" by Jean-François Millet, c. 1862
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave To have dominion over sea and land; To trace the stars and search the heavens for power. To feel the passion of Eternity? Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf There is no shape more terrible than this-- More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed-- More filled with signs and portents for the soul-- More fraught with menace to the universe. What gulfs between him and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned and disinherited, Cries protest to the Judges of the World, A protest that is also prophecy. O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? How will you ever straighten up this shape; Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the Future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings-- With those who shaped him to the thing he is-- When this dumb Terror shall reply to God, After the silence of the centuries?From The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems by Edwin Markham.
"Man with a Hoe" by Jean-François Millet, c. 1862
Edwin Markham (1852-1940)
was one of California's greatest poets and a pioneer educator, with
schools around the country named after him.
His poem, "The Man With the Hoe", which was eventually translated into 40
languages and published in some 50,000 newspapers around the world, was
first published in 1899 in the San Francisco Examiner, and thrust
him into national prominence. It has been called "the Socialist poem of
the century" and "the battle cry of the next thousand years", and was an
important influence in the Progressive movement in California in the
early 20th century.
The poem was inspired by Jean-François Millet's oil painting of a
slack-jawed, downtrodden, brutalized French peasant pausing in the field,
"Man with a Hoe" (c. 1862). Markham was captivated by the painting, and
empathetically intuited the social injustices which shaped the laborer's
bent form and the importance of that message for contemporary society.
Markham is also well-known for his 1922 poem, "Lincoln, the Man of the People", which was selected to be read at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and for the well-loved short poem of inclusiveness, "Outwitted":
He drew a circle that shut me out-- Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!