Ekphrastic poetry is poetry about another work of art — a painting, a sculpture, a dance — and it’s one of the forms of poetry that goes wrong far too often. Instead of writing about the same subject as, say, a painting, a poet doing ekphrasis often talks about the painting itself: how the artist presented the material, how the act of viewing the painting moves the poet. You can already see how this might go wrong, and it sometimes illustrates little more than the laziness of the poet.

That’s not to say ekphrastic poetry can’t be good: W.H. Auden’s 1938 “Musée des Beaux Arts,” for example, a poem about “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” the circa-1560 painting in the style of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters,” Auden wrote — and that theme of suffering is in another famous ekphrastic work, today’s Poem of the Day: “The Man with the Hoe” by Edwin Markham (1852–1940).

The poem first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in January 1899, and it became a sensation, reprinted in newspapers across the country. Originally from Oregon, Markham was an activist poet, working both to promote poetry in the United States and support the socialist-tinged causes of labor. He helped found the Poetry Society of America in 1910 and was invited to read his poem, “Lincoln the Man of the People,” at the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. 

As the subject for “The Man with the Hoe,” Markham used Jean-François Millet’s 1862 painting “L’homme à la houe.” A four-stanza poem in blank verse — unrhymed five-foot lines of mostly iambic pentameter — Markham invokes God’s creation of human beings in his image as the contrast by which to illuminate the horror of the deadened life of the manual laborer.

“How will the Future reckon with this Man,” Markham asks, “When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world / After the silence of the centuries?” Dated in its sentiments — technology would end up doing far more than socialism to alleviate the condition of oppressed labor — Markham’s poem nonetheless remains an important remnant of the movements into politics and freer verse forms that would soon take over the American scene.