Edwin Markham, who has been called the dean of American poets, received national fame, and later

worldwide fame,
when he published The Man with the Hoe. It changed his career immediately. The poem consists of forty-nine lines
divided into five stanzas of social commentary that focus on Americas working class and their sufferings. It is a striking
poem of protest against exploited labor.
After viewing French artist Jean-Franois Millets world-famous painting of a peasant leaning on his hoe, The Man with the
Hoe (1862), Markham was inspired to write his poem in 1898. He is reported to have seen the original painting, which
had a profound effect on him, in San Francisco. Markham was at a New Years Eve celebration when he read the poem
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, newspapers, and
books numerous times. The poems success allowed Markham to spend more time writing and lecturing. In regard to the
reform movements concerning labor struggles of the time, the poem generated much controversy. The newspapers
received many letters regarding The Man with the Hoe. The poem was open to different interpretations. Some readers
said that the poem was advocating socialism: Some were in support of the concept; others were against it. Others said
the poem contained a prophetic message that could incite unessential reforms. Still others considered the poem a
medium for expressing farmers and workers grievances.
For Markham, Millets peasant symbolized the exploited classes worldwide. Markham said that he viewed it as a poem
of hope. a cry for justice. In the fourth stanza, Markham addresses the masters, lords, and rulers in all lands. He
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 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?
Selecting the best way to express his poetic ideas about social and spiritual beliefs, Markham chose blank verse, for it
provided the flexibility he needed. As Markham employed language, he made use of several poetic devices, including
vivid descriptions, extended metaphors, rhetorical 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 toil, struggles,
and injustices, to the extent that one can visualize the negative effects: Bowed by the weight of centuries, The
emptiness of ages in his face, on his back the burden of the world. Markham asks, Whose breath blew out the light
within this brain? Some other poets have also shown interest in the treatment of humankind. Among them is
eighteenth century Robert Burns, who also was a farmer and a poet. In his poem Mans Inhumanity to Man, he writes
of the many ills that have befallen humankind: Mans inhumanity to man,/ Makes countless thousands mourn.
The second stanza of The Man with the Hoe opens with an allusion to the Genesis creation story; Markham refers to
humanity as the Thing the Lord God made and gave/ To have dominion over sea and land. Markham suggests that
humans have lost their position and are no longer held in high esteem, as God intended. Human dignity has been taken
away. The Thing is the antithesis of the man whom David describes in Psalm 8:4-5: What is man, that thou art mindful
of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?/ Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown
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 clearly condemns
the exploitation of labor. Such conditions have caused the laborer to have an aching stoop and to become devoid of
mind and heart. Markham also challenges the Judges of the World. In the last stanza, he alludes to changes in the
future that may come about as a result of protests and rebellions. Consequently, Markham wants to know how the
world will react When this dumb Terror shall reply 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 one again --
as though to dig for apparent meaning.

"Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans / Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground /The emptiness of ages in his face."
already the speaker is going for a very broad rhetoric with general terms like "centuries" and "emptiness" appropriated
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 that grieves not and that never hopes / Stolid and
stunned, a brother to the ox?" Beast of burden. The speaker is adding more and more meaning to his propped up
symbol against another symbol of those that "made him" this way.

The list of rhetorical questions transforms the symbol into the beast of burden:

Who loosened and let down the 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 face the passion of Eternity?

Note how the transformation focuses on the symbol then expands outward to the divine. And note the divine here is
used somewhat cynically -- who has dominion over beasts -- man. But who makes a man into a beast -- man? Divine?

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 world'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 things is
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 device with,
"What gulfs between him and the seraphim! / Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him / Are Plato and the swing of
Pleiades?" In one way these lines are trying to find meaning with the man now a beast of burden. Knowledge means
nothing to someone meant only to work. And this work is central to progress but with a price, "Time's tragedy is in that
aching stoop; / Through this dread shape humanity betrayed," with the divine still pushing man down, "Plundered,
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, lords and
rulers in all lands, / Is this the handiwork you give to God," Now here the divine is separated into two groups -- God's
work, and man, taking up the name of the divine's work. And what is presented, "This monstrous thing distorted and
soul quenched?" And with the rest of the stanza there's a call to change what is being made with "music and the
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 reckon with
this Man?" The previous stanza talked about the present, the ones before that the past, and here we get to see the
prophecy through questions, "How answer his brute question in that hour / When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the
world?" Even beasts rebel like angels when pushed with the aftermath being, "When this dumb Terror shall reply to
God / After the silence of the centuries?" Silence, dumb, a reply that is not a reply. In focusing upon Millets Man with a
Hoe, Markham challenged the efficacy of republican agrarian myths -- often embodied in the image of the sturdy,
independent, and proud yeoman farmer. In contrast, this painting presented a bent and broken peasant, wizened
beyond his years, who toiled at the seemingly impossible task of cultivating a rocky wasteland stretching to the pictures
horizon. Markham wrote the opening stanza of the poem upon seeing Millets world-famous painting.
Such powerful language angered those Americans who still believed in the nobility of rural work and the sacredness of
the land. In response to those who resisted the call to agrarian reform, Markham adopted the view of social reformers,
arguing that his poem not only embraced agrarian labor, but also indicted the evils of the industrial system. He wrote in
1900:
I soon realized that Millet puts before us no chance toiler, no mere man of the fields. No, this stunned and stolid peasant
is the type of industrial oppression in all lands and in all labors. He might be a man with a needle in a New York sweat
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, 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 handiwork.
In the hoeman we see the slow, sure, awful degradation of man through endless, hopeless and joyless labor. Did I say
labor? Nodrudgery.
Indeed, this poem represented a form of literary dissent a protest against the changing conditions of labor in rural and
urban America. As demonstrated by the powerful public response to both Markhams poem and Millets painting, the
representation of the worker, both literary and visual, served as a lightening rod in the struggle over social change. By
the 1880s, the worker had assumed a variety of social guises: serving the ends of reform as the hapless victim of
industrial oppression and bolstering the forces of the status quo as the demonized agent of anarchy and violent change.