The Man with the Hoe

[Spoken Intro]
The following poem is one that I have loved since
I was in about the third or fourth grade
Which was around 1949 or 50
Somewhere around there
And it was very special to me at the time
I have read it and reread it
And every time I read it
It seems to be more pertinent
It seems to be that
The longer we live
The less concern we have for our fellow man

[Spoken Poem]
The Man with thе Hoe
By Edwin Markham

Bowed by the wеight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe as he 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 his brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back his brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within his brain?
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 sun
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 swings of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song
The rifts 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 his shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the outward 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 that shaped him to the things he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of centuries?