The Man with the Hoe By Edwin Markham

Author’s Background

—  Charles Edward Anson Markham

—  1852, Oregon City in the Oregon Territory

—  Samuel Barzillai Markham and Elizabeth Winchell

—  1856, he learned to do manual labor

—  California College in Vacaville (teacher’s certification), San Jose Normal School and Christian School in Santa Rosa

—  1872, Los Beros California

—  1874, Coloma

Entered three marriages

—  1875,  Annie Cox

—  1887, Caroline Bailey

—  1898,  Anna Catherine Murphy (“collaborator and editor” of Markham)

—  1880s and 1890s – continued teaching and established himself as an important poetic voice

—  Thomas Lake Harris – his ideas shaped much of Markham’s intellectual and artistic development

—  Hamlin Garland – emphasize the realistic

—  Ambrose Bierce – praised him for his idealism

Background of the Literary Text

—  inspired by the French artist, Jean Millet’s painting L'homme à la houe

§  Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers

—  was first presented as a public poetry reading at a New Year’s Eve party in 1898

—  The man in the painting is a bowed-broken-down French peasant hoeing the ground.

—  translated into 37 languages and printed in newspapers and magazines more than 12 thousand times

—  “the battle-cry of the next thousand years”

—  has won for Edwin Markham the title of "Poet Laureate of the Laboring Classes"

Vocabulary Words

—  hoe- an implement with a thin flat blade on a long handle used especially for cultivating, weeding, or loosening the earth around plants

—  rapture- paradise

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

—  stolid- unemotional, impassive

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

—  censure- judgement involving condemnation

More tongued with censure of the world’ blind greed

—  portents- omen, signs

More filled with signs and portents for the soul

—  seraphim- order of angels

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!

—  Plato- one of the greatest philosophers in ancient Greece

Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades

—  Pleiades- a constellation

Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades

—  infamies- disrepute

Make right the immemorial infamies,

—  perfidious- faithless, disloyal

Make right the immemorial infamies,

—  immedicable- incurable

Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes

—  brute- heartless

How answer his brute question in that hour

Analysis of the poem

—  The poem evokes the “much laboring” of humanity using the symbolism of the laborer leaning upon his hoe, burdened by his work, but receiving little rest and reward.

—  Persona: The author himself

  Addressee: To everyone, especially who sees this kind of social injustice

—  The main theme of the poem is that, hard physical labor without any reward completely dehumanizes a person.

—  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.

—  Instead of being dead to rapture and despair, man should be alive to the reddening of the rose.

—  Man was born to trace the stars, not bear on his back the burden of the world.

Best part of the poem

O 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 shape;

Connection in the real world

—  abused and abusers

—  too much use of power

—  blindness of the rights

—  social injustice

God made man in His own image,

In the image of God He made him

 – Genesis

—  We are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. We are all His children. He did not create man to suffer from other men and from all His creation.

Kathlyn Joy B. Galang

MAEd English of AUF