xt7qjq0stw34_2585 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7qjq0stw34/data/mets.xml https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7qjq0stw34/data/1997ms474.dao.xml unknown archival material 1997ms474 English University of Kentucky The physical rights to the materials in this collection are held by the University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center.  Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. W. Hugh Peal manuscript collection Edwin Markham signed typescript poem, The Man with the Hoe text 43.94 Cubic Feet 86 boxes, 4 oversize boxes, 22 items Poor-Good Peal accession no. 11453. Edwin Markham signed typescript poem, The Man with the Hoe 2017 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7qjq0stw34/data/1997ms474/Box_25/Folder_16/Multipage8738.pdf [1924?] 1924 [1924?] section false xt7qjq0stw34_2585 xt7qjq0stw34 THE MAN WITH THE HOE
By EDWIN MARKHAM
Author of Lincoln, the Man of the People; The Ballad of the Gallows-Bird, etc.

Written after seeing Millet’s world-famous painting of a brutalized toiler in the deep abyss of labor.

God made man in his own image:
in the image of God He made him—Genesis.

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 t ilence of the centuries? ‘

m

This poem has been repeatedly called ’ ‘the supreme poem of the century” and ”the battle-cry of
the next thousand years.’ ’
Copyright 1899, 1924