Today’s Poem: The Man with the Hoe
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
The Man with the Hoe
by Edwin Markham
(Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting)
God made man in His own image,
in the image of God made He him. — Genesis.
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 danger 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? ═════════════════════════
Ekphrastic poetry is poetry about another work of art — a painting, a sculpture, a dance — and it’s one of the forms of poetry that can easily go wrong. Instead of writing about the same subject as, say, a painting, a poet doing ekphrasis sometimes ends up talking about the painting itself: how the artist presented the material, how the act of viewing the painting moves the poet.
You can already see how this might go south. The resulting poem occasionally illustrates little more than the laziness of the poet — My self-appreciation of the delicacy of my artistic feelings, formed by hijacking the work of an artist who created something actually original!
That’s not to say ekphrastic poetry can’t be good, but only that I think we should start with a surmountable suspicion about it. We could speak here of John Keats’s 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” of course. Or, an old favorite, W.H. Auden’s 1938 “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem that mentions Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the 16th-century painting by (or at the least in the style of) Pieter Bruegel the Elder. “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters,” Auden writes, in a brilliant opening.
That theme of suffering shows up in another famous ekphrastic work: Today’s Poem, “The Man with the Hoe” by Edwin Markham (1852–1940). The poem first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in January 1899, and it became an enormous sensation, reprinted in newspapers across the country.
Originally from Oregon, Markham was an activist poet, working both to promote poetry in the United States and support the socialist-tinged causes of labor. He helped found the Poetry Society of America in 1910 and was invited to read his poem, “Lincoln, the Man of the People,” at the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. (The posthumous success of the poem “Ephemera” in Jack London’s 1909 novel Martin Eden is based on “The Man with the Hoe,” with the fictional poem’s author, the character Russ Brissenden, a sort of failed Edwin Markham, who was London’s fellow northern Californian at the time.)
As the subject for “The Man with the Hoe,” Markham used Jean-François Millet’s 1862 painting Man with a Hoe. A four-stanza poem in blank verse — unrhymed five-foot lines of mostly iambic pentameter — Markham invokes God’s creation of human beings in his image as the contrast by which to illuminate the horror of the deadened life of the manual laborer. “How will the Future reckon with this Man,” Markham asks, “When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world / After the silence of the centuries?”
The poem runs on the power of its hortatory declarations. Yes, it’s dated in its sentiments (technology would end up doing far more than socialism to alleviate the condition of oppressed rural labor). Markham’s poem nonetheless remains an important remnant of the movements into politics and freer verse forms that would soon take over the American art scene.
Here's another poem on the same subject, by the contemporary American poet David Middleton: https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/575
For those interested in the internal noodlings of us here at Poems Ancient and Modern, ekphrastic poetry is a place where Sally Thomas and I differ. Oh, we agree that there are good ekphrastic poems and bad ones. But she thinks my initial misgivings about such poetry — my "surmountable suspicion" — is just one of the hobbyhorses and foibles that we have to put up with from our friends.