“THE MAN WITH THE HOE.”

Evening Star, Issue 23527, 16 March 1940, Page 12

“THE MAN WITH THE HOE.”

Epwin Markham, the American poet whose death was reported a week ago. might fairly be included among the men who have become famous for one poem. In his own country—but not further—he was famous for two. Forty years ago, following other verses which have been called “ poems of protest, insurrectionary in theme but conventional in effect,” he startled the world with ‘The Man with the Hoe,reproduced to-day in our Literary Column. The sub-title explained that it was “ written after seeing Millet’s worldfamous painting.” He made Millet’s figure a symbol of the social injustice of the world, pressing on one class till it stood no higher than the beasts—injustice threatening a terrible retribution at some future time. “ The yeoman,” he wrote, “ is --the landed and

well-to-do farmer; yon need shed no tears for him. But here in the Millet picture "is his opposite—the hoeman; the landless, the soul-blighted workman of the world, the dumb creature that has no time to rest, no time to think, no time for the hopes that ' make us men.” Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox . . . ,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'the silence of the centuries?

The protest was vehement. Markham had written a fine poem, passionate with emotion, compelling with* its cadences and the beauty of its images, a poem to make men think. First printed in the San Francisco ‘Examiner,* it was republished all over the world, but the moral it drew from the picture was not Millet’s. Under all the burdens of the peasants that he painted lie saw something transcending them—the nobility of, labour.. His description of ‘ The Man with a Hoe’ was: “The drama is enveloped in splendours,’’ It would be strange if the French peasant were duller or more debased than, say, Thomas Hardy’s rustics. There are more yeomen, as distinct from hoemen, probably in France than in any other country, and when revolution came—in Russia—it. was not made by the oppressed men of the soil hut by the proletariat of the towns. Hecatombs of peasants were among its victims, In Spain likewise, where the lot of the peasant was a great deal harder than in France, nobody cared much for his trophies once they were made a recruiting cry. Commentators have got round Mr Markham’s difficulty by making his hoeman the symbol for toilers of every kind, but a Barcelona striker might be as much astonished by the: suggestion that he was a dumb creature, brother to the ox, as any labourer of the countryside. Markham’s other outstanding poem was on ‘ Lincoln, the Man of the People.’ It was written in the same non-revolutionary metre, .with a like use of parallelism, but, the subject having less universality, it is less effective.