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?

An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum

BY STEPHEN SPENDER
Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor:
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-
seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir
Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease,
His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class
One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream
Of squirrel's game, in tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head,

Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these
Children, these windows, not this map, their world,
Where all their future's painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example.

With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal —
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, inspector, visitor,

This map becomes their window and these windows
That shut upon their lives like catacombs,
Break O break open till they break the town
And show the children to green fields, and make their world
Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues
Run naked into books the white and green leaves open
History theirs whose language is the sun.

Ars Poetica
BY ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean

But be.

I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260)

Emily Dickinson - 1830-1886

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud

BY JOHN DONNE
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

When I Was One-and-Twenty

BY A. E. HOUSMAN
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

The Man He Killed

BY THOMAS HARDY
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

"But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

"I shot him dead because —

Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

Richard Cory
BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

William Wordsworth Lucy Poems

I.
Strange fits of passion have I known: And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover’s ear alone, What once to me befell.
When she I loved look’d every day 5 Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath an evening moon.
Upon the moon I fix’d my eye,
All over the wide lea; 10
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reach’d the orchard-plot; And, as we climb’d the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot 15 Came near and nearer still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept, Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon. 20
My horse moved on; hoof after hoof He raised, and never stopp’d:
When down behind the cottage roof, At once, the bright moon dropp’d.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide 25 Into a lover’s head!
‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried, ‘If Lucy should be dead!’

II.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove;
A maid whom there were none to praise, And very few to love.
A violet by a mossy stone 5 Half-hidden from the eye!
--Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be; 10
But she is in her grave, and, O! The difference to me!
III.
I travell’d among unknown men In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee.
‘Tis past, that melancholy dream! 5 Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time, for still I seem
To love thee more and more.
Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire; 10
And she I cherish’d turn her wheel Beside an English fire.
Thy mornings show’d, thy nights conceal’d The bowers where Lucy play’d;
And thine too is the last green field 15 That Lucy’s eyes survey’d.

IV.
Three years she grew in sun and shower; Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown:
This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make 5 A lady of my own.
‘Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 10 Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
‘She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs; 15 And her’s shall be the breathing balm,
And her’s the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
‘The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend; 20 Nor shall she fail to see
E’en in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form
By silent sympathy.
‘The stars of midnight shall be dear 25 To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face. 30
‘And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
Where she and I together live 35 Here in this happy dell.’

Thus Nature spake—The Work was done—

How soon my Lucy’s race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene; 40 The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.
V.
A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears:
She seem’d a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force; 5 She neither hears nor sees;
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees.