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The Man with the Hoe

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, c
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?

M3 Whose was the hand that slanted back this

brow?

4 Whose breath blew out the light within this 3

brain?

The Man with the Hoe

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 pillared the blue firmament with light? Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf There is no shape more terrible than thisMore 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.

What gulfs between him anù 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?

The Man with the Hoe

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?

The Man with the Hoe

How will it be with kingdoms, and with

kings

With those who shaped him to the thing he

is

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When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?

A Look into the Gulf

I looked one night, and there Semiramis,
With all her mourning doves about her head,
Sat rocking on an ancient road of Hell,
Withered and eyeless, chanting to the moon
Snatches of song they sang to her of old
Upon the lighted roofs of Nineveh.
And then her voice rang out with rattling
laugh:

"The bugles! they are crying back again— Bugles that broke the nights of Babylon, And then went crying on through Nineveh.

Stand back, ye trembling messengers of ill!
Women, let go my hair: I am the Queen,
A whirlwind and a blaze of swords to quell
Insurgent cities. Let the iron tread
Of armies shake the earth. Look, lofty

towers:

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