The Man with the Hoe

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 menace 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?

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?

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?

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.

A Look into the Gulf

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

Look, lofty towers:

Of armies shake the earth.
Assyria goes by upon the wind!"

And so she babbles by the ancient road,
While cities turned to dust upon the Earth
Rise through her whirling brain to live again –
Babbles all night, and when her voice is dead
Her weary lips beat on without a sound.

Brotherhood

The crest and crowning of all good,
Life's final star, is Brotherhood;
For it will bring again to Earth
Her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
Will send new light on every face,
A kingly power upon the race.
And till it come, we men are slaves,
And travel downward to the dust of graves.

Come, clear the way, then, clear the way:
Blind creeds and kings have had their day.
Break the dead branches from the path:
Our hope is in the aftermath

Our hope is in heroic men,

Star-led to build the world again.

To this Event the ages ran.

Make

way for Brotherhood — make way

for Man.