The Man With the Hoe

The Man With the Hoe is a famous poem written by Edwin Markham inspired by the painting "L'homme à la houe" by Jean-François Millet; it was first presented as a public poetry reading at a New Year's Eve party in 1898, and published soon afterwards. It evokes the laborings of much of humanity using the symbolism of a laborer leaning upon his hoe, burdened by his work, but receiving little rest or reward. It has been called "the battle-cry of the next thousand years" and translated into more than 30 languages. [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/markham/reflections.htm]

:::The Man with the Hoe

: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 the aching stoop;:Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,:Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,:Cries protest to the Powers that made the world.:A protest that is also a 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 all shores?:How will it be with kingdoms and with kings —:With those who shaped him to the thing he is —:When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world.:After the silence of the centuries?

External links

* [http://www.arches.uga.edu/~wparks/hoe.html "The Man With the Hoe" & "L'homme à la houe"]
* [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/markham/millet.htm "Man With the Hoe" and Markham's poem]
* [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/markham/reflections.htm Markham's reflections on "Man With the Hoe"]