The Man With The Hoe

The Man With the Hoe
EDWIN MARKHAM
4162

Written after seeing the painting by Millet)
“God made man in His own image:
In His own Image made He him”-Genesis

Bowed with 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 law?
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 Eeternity?
Is this the dream he dreamed, who shaped the suns,
And piliared the blue firmament with light? 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 guifs 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 shane the suffering ages look:
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop:
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed
Plundered, profane, and disinherited
Cries protest to the judges of the world
A protest that is also prophecy

Oh, 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 shave:
Touch it again with Immortality:
Giya hack the upward looking and the light:
Rebuild in it the music and the dream:
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidous wrongs, Immedicable woes?

Oh, masters, lords, and rulers in all lands
How will the future reckon with the 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?