DDCPoetry

Original poem reprinted online here:  "The Man with the Hoe" by Edwin Markham Originally read: September 28, 2013 More information about the Poet: Edwin Markham This poem is an eckphrastic piece based on this painting by Millet. What the speaker does in the poem is relate the singular image to an expansive one and back to a singular one again -- as though to dig for apparent meaning. "Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans / Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground /The emptiness of ages in his face."  already the speaker is going for a very broad rhetoric with general terms like "centuries" and "emptiness" appropriated to the man in the portrait who is now become more of a symbol for the reader to sympathize with. For the man is, "made him dead to rapture and despair / A thing that grieves not and that never hopes / Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?"  Beast of burden.  The speaker is adding more and more meaning to his propped up...