by Edwin Markham

Markham composed "The Man With the Hoe" after seeing Jean-Francois Millet's world-famous painting of a brutalized toiler in the deep abyss of labor.

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 markt their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with cries against the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More packt 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?
Thru this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Thru this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made 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-quencht?
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?

(Signed: Your Edwin Markham: Staten Island, N.Y.)

Edwin Markham comments on his poem:

"Millet has Homeric directness in his paintings. He tries to make the common express the sublime. He tries to make the infinite visible. In The Man with the Hoe, I saw that Millet had swept his canvas bare of everything that was merely pretty, and projected this startling figure before us in all its rugged and savage reality.... I saw in it the symbol of betrayed humanity."

"My purpose [was] to write a poem that should cry the lost rights of the toiling multitude...deprived of the enlarging education of the mind, deprived of the ennobling education of the heart. I hoped to breathe into the lines the spirit of brotherhood, the spirit of social humanity."

"My poem is a poem of hope. It is a cry for justice and an appeal to the humanity of the "masters, lords and rulers" of the world. The Hoe-man is not every man with a hoe: he is the man under the hoofs of the labor world. He is the slave of drugery because he is the victim of industrial oppression."