THE MAN WITH THE HOE
THE MAN WITH THE HOE
-Edwin Markham
The Man with the Hoe is a protest
against the exploitation of a farm labourer.
Markham draws the picture of a privation and suffering of centuries. His
soul is so dead that he leads an animal existence. God made man in his own image but this is
what man has made of man.
The Man with the Hoe is bowed by the
weight of centuries. The poem is an
explicit response to an oil painting by the French artist Millet. It is one of the several paintings on
contemporary agricultural working-class subjects Millet produced at the middle
of the 19th century. It
depicts a rough-shod farmer or agricultural worker. Probably exhausted and certainly leaning
forward on his hoe in a flat scrub landscape as yet untamed and unplowed.
The poet feels that five to six
centuries of suffering and sorrow made him indifferent to joy or despair. He neither grieves nor hopes. The poem is successful at issuing a broad
revolutionary warning to capitalists and politicians.
Markham worries that God made
everything in the world but those things are denied for men. He asks the lords and rulers of all lands
that this is the gift they want to give to God.
He again asks that when they will give the ever straightening shape to
those slaves. He requests them to give
back the upward looking and the light.
And he asks to rebuild the life of those men which is fileed with music
and dream.
This poem is a symbol of betrayed
humanity, the toiler ground down through ages of oppression, through ages of
social injustice. He is the man pushed
away from the land by those who fail to use the land, till at last he has
become a serf, with no mind in his muscle and no heart in his handwork. He is the man pushed back and shrunken up by the
special privileges conferred upon the few.
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