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.

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?

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.