The Man With
The Hoe
Edward Markham’s tribute to a
Painting by Jean-François Millet
Man with a Hoe
Jean-François Millet
French, Barbizon, 1860-1862
Oil on Canvas
31 ½ x 39 in.
"As I have never seen
anything but fields since I was born, I try to say as best I can what I saw and
felt when I was at work," wrote Jean-François Millet. At the Salon of
1863, Man with a Hoe caused a storm of controversy. The man in the
picture was considered brutish and frightening by Parisian bourgeoisie. The
Industrial Revolution had caused a steady exodus from French farms, and Man
with a Hoe was interpreted as a socialist protest about the peasant's
plight. Though his paintings were judged in political terms, Millet declared
that he was neither a socialist nor an agitator.
A religious fatalist,
Millet believed that man was condemned to bear his burdens. This farmer is
Everyman. His face is lit, yet composed of blots of color that give him no
individuality. He is big and dirty and utterly exhausted by the back-breaking
work of turning this rocky, thistle-ridden earth into a productive field like
the one being worked in the distance. A tribute to dignity and courage in the
face of a life of unremitting exertion, Man with a Hoe was long
considered a symbol of the laboring class.
© The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2000. Online Source:
The J. Paul
Getty Museum
by Edward Markham
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 markt their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their 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 packt 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?
Thru this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Thru 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-quencht?
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 all shores?
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?
Keith and Marnie
Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site
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