I agree with a number of commentators that the poet's reading misses the sense of the painting. You can see the weight of the labourer's hands on his hoe. Face, hands and feet are the same colours as the earth that he is working. He seems to be digging (or clearing) a drainage channel, and is taking a well-earned rest while calculating how much longer the rest of the job will take. He is braced on the earth, pushing away from it at the same as resting on it. Just look at those triangles and pyramids of stability. His strength is the strength of the earth. He harks back to the original Adam.
"How will the Future reckon with this Man,", the various revolutions, starting in 1899, with the Boxes Rebellion, going on through Russia, China, Germany and others, has shown the answer clearly, No Better.
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.
My two cents toward that debate is that I've always been a bit puzzled as to why this particular practice needs to be set apart with a special nomenclature. I don't have any feeling for or against it as such.
I will add that I do not, in fact, absolutely disagree with Jody! The conversation, as I recall it, has basically always gone like this:
JB: I do not like ekphrastic poetry
ST: Why, exactly?
JB: (See Above)
ST: Well, yeah, I can see that . . .
Partly, I'm pathologically conflict-averse. But also, his particular reservations have made me genuinely more attentive to the possible pitfalls of this subgenre of poetry (especially if I am committing said subgenre myself, as I sometimes do --- there it's good to err on the side of the overcritic). I'm not going to write off ekphrastic poetry as a whole category, but it's useful to consider with some rigor what modes of engagement with other artworks do and don't succeed, and why.
I have my own pet peeves, too --- I don't love persona poems in general (unless you happen to be Robert Browning or Eugene Lee-Hamilton, for example), and I really tend to resist, reflexively, ekphrastic poems speaking in the persona of the subject of the work of art ("The Man With the Hoe Sets Everybody Straight!"). It just seems too easy to have that subject think and say whatever you, the poet, would think and say if you were that subject --- appropriating the subject as a mask or alter ego for yourself, voicing your view of the world, which at the end of the day is just engaging with yourself and not the subject, or the work, or the artist, at all.
This is clearly not always and everywhere the case -- but it's one of those too-easy moves that it's good to be able to identify, whether you catch yourself doing it or are assessing a poem you didn't write. So the personal pet peeve can become actually a useful critical measure. Knowing what can go wrong, you look at the poem before you and ask if it does go wrong or not.
I hadn't thought, Sally, of a subspecies of ekphrastic poetry that it is actually a persona-poem, but, yeah, now that you point it out, that's absolutely right — except, in our reversals, I have greater tolerance for persona-poems than you, I think. Or, at least, I don't start reading them with the suspicion I have when reading ekphrastic poetry. Funny old world, isn't it?
Well, and as soon as I say I don't like persona poems, I can think of exceptions --- my friend Jane Scharl has some notably good ones in her collection, Ponds. I think part of why those poems work when others don't is that Jane also writes for the theater and has a good sense of the "dramatic" part of "dramatic monologue." Also, her speakers are conversing consciously with the larger stories in which they exist in the tradition, without trying to hijack or subvert those stories, which is a drearily predictable trope.
So anyway, while there are definitely certain things that *in general* seem like lazy moves to me, I don't really go into a poem expecting the poet to make those lazy moves --- even if I have seen it done before, I always hope I'm not going to see it done this time! Sometimes I am disappointed, but sometimes I am not, which is just true of reading any poetry. Sometimes it's not good, but sometimes it is. And sometimes, truly, my sense of surprise and delight is that I know how a thing can go wrong, but then it doesn't.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by ekphrastic! I have just returned from Europe, which included a 10 hour overnight bus journey, and then the normal flights.
I was simply thinking of the string of questions in Blake’s poem and the repeated question who made this?
I think you're right here. This is, if I'm remembering rightly, the opening poem of an entire book of poems responding to Millet's paintings, but it seems to me that it's engaging with Markham's poem on that same painting at least as much as the painting itself, to imagine an entirely different way of seeing a painted representation of a human being.
Last night, in an inn for our wedding anniversary, I picked up a book of "101 Beloved Poems," or some such title (why always 101, I wonder . . . it's like the baker's dozen of poetry anthology titles). The book contained many poems we've featured here, and some we haven't . . . but lo, as I paged through it, there was Edward Markham and his "Man With a Hoe," numbered among the 101 Beloved!
Not only "thing," but "monstrous thing." Even beyond Marx's "rural idiocy." Very grand Miltonic language, and a Blakean imagination of the socio-economic system as a satanic parodist of the Creator, which manufactures these diminished beings solely for exploitation. As Morgoth and/or Sauron and Saruman manufactured orcs in Tolkien. Thanks Mr. Bottum!
Your remarks about ekphrastic poetry are especially interesting, as are the background on this poet you provide and the place the poem may mark in the social history of American poetry. Still, Markham's writing, here, is awful.
Condescending of Markham to assume this worker's intellect is on a level with a brute beast: to my eye he looks, in the painting, exhausted, yes, but not brain-dead "the light within this brain blown out" etc. And theologically not entirely on point: Genesis does say that man was made in God's image, but it also says "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." But I take the point. It's Ruskin's question, from "Sesame and Lilies" (1865): "Which of us is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest—and for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay?"
I've been reading through some of Van Gogh's letters -- Millet gets mentioned more than anyone else as a painter he wanted to emulate, particularly in painting peasant life, in paintings like "The Potato Eaters". Van Gogh's got critiqued for the shape of the hands and heads for instance, but he'd done lots of studies and was drawing from life. He wasn't trying to represent anything he felt to be ignoble in the shapes -- the conditions of life he describes are very difficult to read about -- but Van Gogh was trying to paint something very human in forms that he admired and loved -- more than he admired and loved figures that show less connection to the earth. I wonder if Millet had a similar approach.
I believe every line is in strict iambic pentameter, with standard variations?
This is certainly of historic interest, and it's skillfully wrought within its own conceit and confines. But that, from his lofty stance, he can only describe this man as a "Thing" (who he assumes to be incapable even of appreciation of natural beauty), is deeply repellent!
I imagine admiring readers were enabled both to feel virtuous in enjoining their pity for the poor labourer, and their condemnation of society's failings, and also safely superior in their presumed elevated intellect and sensibility. I'm not surprised it was popular!
A bit more, from a keyboard: yes, it was the "thing" business that rather torqued me. I grew up in the rural South, with segregation still de jure till I was in my teens, and de facto after that. I knew (and sometimes worked with) poor black people whose whole life involved demanding physical labor, and whose education didn't go any further than the barest levels of literacy and simple arithmetic. Poor white people, too, but the blacks were of course poorer. I can assure you that they were mentally very very much alive, even if they never so much as heard Plato's name.
Granted, they were materially better off than a 19th c laborer. But we have ample evidence that even the slaves of the pre-Civil-War South were a long way from being "things."
I agree with a number of commentators that the poet's reading misses the sense of the painting. You can see the weight of the labourer's hands on his hoe. Face, hands and feet are the same colours as the earth that he is working. He seems to be digging (or clearing) a drainage channel, and is taking a well-earned rest while calculating how much longer the rest of the job will take. He is braced on the earth, pushing away from it at the same as resting on it. Just look at those triangles and pyramids of stability. His strength is the strength of the earth. He harks back to the original Adam.
"How will the Future reckon with this Man,", the various revolutions, starting in 1899, with the Boxes Rebellion, going on through Russia, China, Germany and others, has shown the answer clearly, No Better.
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.
My two cents toward that debate is that I've always been a bit puzzled as to why this particular practice needs to be set apart with a special nomenclature. I don't have any feeling for or against it as such.
I'm definitely more on Sally's side here. I don't understand the misgivings.
Maybe I just workshopped too many. By the end, most read to me like:
Michelangelo speaks to me —
To me, special me, since I can see
What he, fellow genius, really means
By the way his David statue leans,
The curve of its arm, the shape of its leg.
For viewers like me, the artist must beg:
Me, special me, who sees so well
That only the best of sculptors can tell.
I will add that I do not, in fact, absolutely disagree with Jody! The conversation, as I recall it, has basically always gone like this:
JB: I do not like ekphrastic poetry
ST: Why, exactly?
JB: (See Above)
ST: Well, yeah, I can see that . . .
Partly, I'm pathologically conflict-averse. But also, his particular reservations have made me genuinely more attentive to the possible pitfalls of this subgenre of poetry (especially if I am committing said subgenre myself, as I sometimes do --- there it's good to err on the side of the overcritic). I'm not going to write off ekphrastic poetry as a whole category, but it's useful to consider with some rigor what modes of engagement with other artworks do and don't succeed, and why.
I have my own pet peeves, too --- I don't love persona poems in general (unless you happen to be Robert Browning or Eugene Lee-Hamilton, for example), and I really tend to resist, reflexively, ekphrastic poems speaking in the persona of the subject of the work of art ("The Man With the Hoe Sets Everybody Straight!"). It just seems too easy to have that subject think and say whatever you, the poet, would think and say if you were that subject --- appropriating the subject as a mask or alter ego for yourself, voicing your view of the world, which at the end of the day is just engaging with yourself and not the subject, or the work, or the artist, at all.
This is clearly not always and everywhere the case -- but it's one of those too-easy moves that it's good to be able to identify, whether you catch yourself doing it or are assessing a poem you didn't write. So the personal pet peeve can become actually a useful critical measure. Knowing what can go wrong, you look at the poem before you and ask if it does go wrong or not.
I hadn't thought, Sally, of a subspecies of ekphrastic poetry that it is actually a persona-poem, but, yeah, now that you point it out, that's absolutely right — except, in our reversals, I have greater tolerance for persona-poems than you, I think. Or, at least, I don't start reading them with the suspicion I have when reading ekphrastic poetry. Funny old world, isn't it?
Well, and as soon as I say I don't like persona poems, I can think of exceptions --- my friend Jane Scharl has some notably good ones in her collection, Ponds. I think part of why those poems work when others don't is that Jane also writes for the theater and has a good sense of the "dramatic" part of "dramatic monologue." Also, her speakers are conversing consciously with the larger stories in which they exist in the tradition, without trying to hijack or subvert those stories, which is a drearily predictable trope.
So anyway, while there are definitely certain things that *in general* seem like lazy moves to me, I don't really go into a poem expecting the poet to make those lazy moves --- even if I have seen it done before, I always hope I'm not going to see it done this time! Sometimes I am disappointed, but sometimes I am not, which is just true of reading any poetry. Sometimes it's not good, but sometimes it is. And sometimes, truly, my sense of surprise and delight is that I know how a thing can go wrong, but then it doesn't.
For millions of oppressed rural laborers, it was socialism that brought technology to them and substituted tractors for hoes. Lest we forget.
Wow I thought you were going to say it was An ekphrastic riff on the Tyger poem of Blake!
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by ekphrastic! I have just returned from Europe, which included a 10 hour overnight bus journey, and then the normal flights.
I was simply thinking of the string of questions in Blake’s poem and the repeated question who made this?
Ah. "Ekphrastic" poetry is poetry about another work of art — a painting, sculpture, etc.
??? Stupid me, I don't get it.
Like "Little lamb, who made thee?" maybe?
This is a fine job about a popular form that is, as you say, often missed.
Here's another poem on the same subject, by the contemporary American poet David Middleton: https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/575
Rather a rejection of Markham's sentiments, hmmm.
"Not fallen from some paradise whose crops
Turned golden while he plucked a harp’s ripe strings,
He’s come down long hard centuries the same,
Man’s bent-back state no revolutions change."
I think you're right here. This is, if I'm remembering rightly, the opening poem of an entire book of poems responding to Millet's paintings, but it seems to me that it's engaging with Markham's poem on that same painting at least as much as the painting itself, to imagine an entirely different way of seeing a painted representation of a human being.
Last night, in an inn for our wedding anniversary, I picked up a book of "101 Beloved Poems," or some such title (why always 101, I wonder . . . it's like the baker's dozen of poetry anthology titles). The book contained many poems we've featured here, and some we haven't . . . but lo, as I paged through it, there was Edward Markham and his "Man With a Hoe," numbered among the 101 Beloved!
Interesting!
Not only "thing," but "monstrous thing." Even beyond Marx's "rural idiocy." Very grand Miltonic language, and a Blakean imagination of the socio-economic system as a satanic parodist of the Creator, which manufactures these diminished beings solely for exploitation. As Morgoth and/or Sauron and Saruman manufactured orcs in Tolkien. Thanks Mr. Bottum!
Good description!
Your remarks about ekphrastic poetry are especially interesting, as are the background on this poet you provide and the place the poem may mark in the social history of American poetry. Still, Markham's writing, here, is awful.
Condescending of Markham to assume this worker's intellect is on a level with a brute beast: to my eye he looks, in the painting, exhausted, yes, but not brain-dead "the light within this brain blown out" etc. And theologically not entirely on point: Genesis does say that man was made in God's image, but it also says "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." But I take the point. It's Ruskin's question, from "Sesame and Lilies" (1865): "Which of us is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest—and for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay?"
I've been reading through some of Van Gogh's letters -- Millet gets mentioned more than anyone else as a painter he wanted to emulate, particularly in painting peasant life, in paintings like "The Potato Eaters". Van Gogh's got critiqued for the shape of the hands and heads for instance, but he'd done lots of studies and was drawing from life. He wasn't trying to represent anything he felt to be ignoble in the shapes -- the conditions of life he describes are very difficult to read about -- but Van Gogh was trying to paint something very human in forms that he admired and loved -- more than he admired and loved figures that show less connection to the earth. I wonder if Millet had a similar approach.
Thanks for the mention of Ruskin, his question, and his poem.
I believe every line is in strict iambic pentameter, with standard variations?
This is certainly of historic interest, and it's skillfully wrought within its own conceit and confines. But that, from his lofty stance, he can only describe this man as a "Thing" (who he assumes to be incapable even of appreciation of natural beauty), is deeply repellent!
I imagine admiring readers were enabled both to feel virtuous in enjoining their pity for the poor labourer, and their condemnation of society's failings, and also safely superior in their presumed elevated intellect and sensibility. I'm not surprised it was popular!
A bit more, from a keyboard: yes, it was the "thing" business that rather torqued me. I grew up in the rural South, with segregation still de jure till I was in my teens, and de facto after that. I knew (and sometimes worked with) poor black people whose whole life involved demanding physical labor, and whose education didn't go any further than the barest levels of literacy and simple arithmetic. Poor white people, too, but the blacks were of course poorer. I can assure you that they were mentally very very much alive, even if they never so much as heard Plato's name.
Granted, they were materially better off than a 19th c laborer. But we have ample evidence that even the slaves of the pre-Civil-War South were a long way from being "things."
I would omit “deeply,” but yes, fundamentally repellent. I’d say more but am doing this on my phone.