Search
Home
Saved
29K views
12
Upload
Sign In
Join
RELATED TITLES
0
Analysis of "Man With the Hoe" Uploaded by Mark Dave Magaoay Camarao
Bestsellers
Books
Audiobooks
Magazines
News
Documents
Sheet Music
Analysis of the poem "Man with the Hoe" American Literature
Save
Embed
Share
Print
Download
Linear & Non Linear Text
1
of 2
Tale of Literary vs. ChunHyang.dbvvbocx Journalistic
Search document
Edwin Markham, who has been called “the dean of American poets,” received national fame, and later wo when he published “The Man with the Hoe.” It changed his career immediately. The poem consists of fo divided into five stanzas of social commentary that focus on America’s working class and their sufferings. poem of protest against exploited labor. After viewing French artist Jean-François Jean-François Millet’s world-famous world-famous painting of a peasant leaning on his hoe, Hoe (1862), Markham was inspired to write his poem in 1898. He is reported to have seen the original pa had a profound effect on him, in San Francisco. Markham was at a New Year’s Eve celebration when he re to an editor of the San Francisco Examiner . Shortly thereafter, the poem was published in that paper. Because of its popularity, the poem was translated into many languages and reprinted in magazines, new books numerous times. The poem’s success allowed Markham Markh am to spend more time writing and le cturing. In reform movements concerning labor struggles of the time, the poem generated much controversy. The received many letters regarding “The Man with the Hoe.” The poem was open to different different interpretations. said that the poem was advocating socialism: Some were in support of the concept; others were against i the poem contained a prophetic message that could incite unessential reforms. Still others considered medium for expressing farmers’ and workers’ grievances. For Markham, Millet’s peasant symbolized the exploited classes worldwide. Markham said that he viewed of hope. a cry for justice.” In the fourth stanza, Markham addresses the “masters, lords, and rulers in interrogates them with an implied sense of optimism:
Is this the handiwork you give to God,This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?How will you ever strai shape,Touch it again with immortality;Give back the upward looking and the light;Rebuild in it the music and the drea the immemorial infamies,Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
Selecting the best way to express his poetic ideas about social and spiritual beliefs, Markham chose blan provided the flexibility he needed. As Markham employed language, he made use of several poetic devi vivid descriptions, extended metaphors, r hetorical questions, literary allusions, and symbolism. In the first stanza, the reader is given a vivid description of a laborer who has been crushed by years of t and injustices, to the extent that one can visualize the negative effects: “Bowed by the weight of cen emptiness of ages in his face,” “on his back the burden of the world.” Markham asks, “Whose breath blew within this brain?” Some other poets have also shown interest in the treatment of humankind. Am eighteenth century Robert Burns, who also was a farmer and a poet. I n his poem “Man’s Inhumanity to Ma of the many ills that have befallen humankind: “Man’s inhumanity to man,/ Makes countless thousands mo The second stanza of “The Man with the Hoe” opens with an allusion to the Genesis creation story; M ark humanity as the “Thing the Lord God made and gave/ To have dominion over sea and land.” Markham humans have lost their position and are no longer held in high esteem, as God intended. Human dignity ha away. The “Thing” is the antithesis of the m an whom David describes in Psalm 8:48:4-5: “What is man, that tho of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?/ Yet thou hast made him little less than God, an him with glory and honor./ Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands. . . .” Markham continues to focus on some of the negative effects of the “Slaves of the wheel of labor.” He clea the exploitation of labor. Such conditions have caused the laborer to have a n “aching stoop” and to beco mind and heart. Markham also challenges “the Judges of the World.” In the last stanza, he alludes to ch future that may come about as a result of protests and rebellions. Consequently, Markham wants to k world will react “When this dumb Terror shall r eply to God,/ After the silence of the centuries?” What the speaker does in the poem is relate the singular image to an expansive one and back to a singular as though to dig for apparent meaning.
of age "Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans / Upon his hoe and gazes on /The Signthe up ground to vote on thisemptiness title already the speaker is going for a very broad rhetoric with general ge neral terms like "centuries" and "emptiness" a Useful Not useful to the man in the portrait who is now become more of a symbol for the reader to sympathize with.
For the man is, "made him dead to rapture and despair / A thing t hat grieves not and that never hopes /
Home
Saved
Bestsellers
Books
Audiobooks
Magazines
News
Documents
Sheet Music
Upload
Sign In
Join
Search
Home
Saved
29K views
12
Upload
Sign In
Join
RELATED TITLES
0
Analysis of "Man With the Hoe" Uploaded by Mark Dave Magaoay Camarao
Bestsellers
Books
Audiobooks
Magazines
News
Documents
Sheet Music
Analysis of the poem "Man with the Hoe" American Literature
Save
Embed
Share
Print
Download
Linear & Non Linear Text
1
of 2
Tale of Literary vs. ChunHyang.dbvvbocx Journalistic
Search document
The rest of the stanza faces the divine, so if heavenly will pushes man back down then "hell" does this: There is no shape more terrible than this -More tongued with censure of the wo rld's blind greed -More filled with signs and portents for the soul -More fraught with menace to the universe.
The key here is the use of repetition: anaphora of more and dashes to simulate a build up of want. More th needed, but with more there's greed and menace.
And then there is the stanza break, but not a break in the momentum. The break serves as a focusing devic "What gulfs between him and the seraphim! / S lave of the wheel of labor, what to him / Are Plato and the Pleiades?" In one way these lines are trying to find meaning with the man now a beast of burden. Knowled nothing to someone meant only to work. And this work is central to progress but with a price, "Time's trag aching stoop; / Through this dread shape humanity betrayed," with the divine still pushing man down, "Plun profaned and disinherited, / Cries protest to the Judges of the World, / A protest that is also prophecy"
The last line transitions to the next stanza and places the speaker as a prophet for protesting, "O masters, lo rulers in all lands, / Is this the handiwork you give to God," Now here the divine is separated into two grou work, and man, taking up the name of the divine's work. And what is presented, "This monstrous thing dist soul quenched?" And with the rest of the stanza there's a call to change what is being made with "music an dream" But note here the stanzas getting shorter and shorter -- the focus and direction is clear.
The speaker asks this big rhetorical question, "O master, lords and rulers in all lands,/ How will the Future this Man?" The previous stanza talked about the present, the ones before that the past, and here we get to prophecy through questions, "How answer his brute question in that hour / When whirlwinds of rebellion s world?" Even beasts rebel like angels when pushed with the aftermath being, "When this dumb Terror sha God / After the silence of the centuries?" Silence, dumb, a reply that is not a reply. In focusing upon Millet’ Hoe, Markham challenged the efficacy of republican agrarian myths -- often em bodied in the image of the s You're Reading a Preview independent, and proud yeoman farmer. In contrast, this painting presented a bent and broken peasant, w beyond his years, who toiled at the seemingly impossible taskwith of cultivating Unlock full access a free trial. a rocky wasteland stretching to horizon. Markham wrote the opening stanza of the poem upon seeing Millet’s world-famous painting. Such powerful language angered those Americans who still believed in the nobility of rural work and the Download With Free Trial the land. In response to those who resisted the call to agrarian reform, Markham adopted the view of soc arguing that his poem not only embraced agrarian labor, but also indicted the evils of the industrial system 1900: I soon realized that Millet puts before us no chance toiler, no mere man of the fields. No, this stunned and is the type of industrial oppression in all lands and in all labors. He might be a man with a needle in a Ne shop, a man with a pick in a West Virginia coal mine…. The hoeman is the symbol of betrayed humanity, the toiler ground down through ages of oppression, thr social injustice. He is the man pushed away from the land by those who fail to use the land, till at last he serf, with no mind in his muscle, and no heart in his handiwork…. In the hoeman we see the slow, sure, awful degradation of man through endless, hopeless and joyless la Sign up to vote on this title labor? No—drudgery. Indeed, this poem represented a form of literary dissent – a protest against the changing conditions of labo Useful Not useful urban America. As demonstrated by the powerful public response to both Markham’s poem and Millet’s representation of the worker, both literary and visual, served as a lightening rod in the struggle over soci
Home
Saved
Bestsellers
Books
Audiobooks
Magazines
News
Documents
Sheet Music
Upload
Sign In
Join
