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Labor Day brought to my mind, after the fact, the once-famous poem, The Man with the Hoe, penned by Edwin Markham and first published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1899. Markham spent his childhood in Suisun, California, where he would have seen plenty of laborers at the inland port, the rail yards and at the many surrounding farms. He took the name and his inspiration for the poem from the already-famous Millet painting, Man with a Hoe' (ca. 1860-1862), also shown below. In this epoch of robotic replacement of workers and a rapidly-growing disparity between rich and poor, let us keep in mind all who toil to make a living, all who are employers, all who are entrusted with workplace safety, and those known to us who are unemployed or underemployed or otherwise in work or vocational transitions. - Fr. Raymond +
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Man with a Hoe,
Jean-François Millet
(French, 1814 - 1875)
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The Man with the Hoe
By Edwin Markham
Written after seeing Millet's World-Famous Painting
God made man in His own image,
in the image of God made He him.
-Genesis.
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this 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 feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
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 danger to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
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;
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?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings-
With those who shaped him to the thing he is-
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?
Source: The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (Doubleday, 1921)
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Throughout my stay here, I have often thought of the community at Ascension, thankful for the time I was able to spend with you and for the nourishment I received from you: both at the altar and in various neighbourhood establishments. You have been and will continue to be a major presence in my prayers here at Mucknell and when I leave. I have really enjoyed hearing from some of you, even if I haven't always been prompt in replying (!), and I hope I will be able to see and worship with you again sometime in 2019.
Yea! We're getting a new water fountain with a water bottle filler
