Schoolwallah's Riverside Podcast

April 26, 2021

Poetry Recitation: The Man with the Hoe BY EDWIN MARKHAM

<p><strong>Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting<br> </strong><br> God made man in His own image,<br> in the image of God made He him. —Genesis.</p> <p>Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans</p> <p>Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,</p> <p>The emptiness of ages in his face,</p> <p>And on his back the burden of the world.</p> <p>Who made him dead to rapture and despair,</p> <p>A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,</p> <p>Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?</p> <p>Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?</p> <p>Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?</p> <p>Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?</p> <p>Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave</p> <p>To have dominion over sea and land;</p> <p>To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;</p> <p>To feel the passion of Eternity?</p> <p>Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns</p> <p>And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?</p> <p>Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf</p> <p>There is no shape more terrible than this—</p> <p>More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—</p> <p>More filled with signs and portents for the soul—</p> <p>More fraught with danger to the universe.</p> <p>What gulfs between him and the seraphim!</p> <p>Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him</p> <p>Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?</p> <p>What the long reaches of the peaks of song,</p> <p>The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?</p> <p>Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;</p> <p>Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;</p> <p>Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,</p> <p>Plundered, profaned and disinherited,</p> <p>Cries protest to the Judges of the World,</p> <p>A protest that is also prophecy.</p> <p>O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,</p> <p>is this the handiwork you give to God,</p> <p>This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ?</p> <p>How will you ever straighten up this shape;</p> <p>Touch it again with immortality;</p> <p>Give back the upward looking and the light;</p> <p>Rebuild in it the music and the dream;</p> <p>Make right the immemorial infamies,</p> <p>Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?</p> <p>O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,</p> <p>How will the Future reckon with this Man?</p> <p>How answer his brute question in that hour</p> <p>When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?</p> <p>How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—</p> <p>With those who shaped him to the thing he is—</p> <p>When this dumb Terror shall reply to God</p> <p>After the silence of the centuries?</p>