“The Man with the Hoe” Introduction

• “The Man with the Hoe” is a poem by Edwin Markham, first published in 1899. Written at a time when workers in the United States had few protections and rights, the poem boldly critiques of the exploitation of laborers by a capitalistic, profit-driven society. Inspired by the French artist Jean-Francois Millet’s famous painting, which depicts a peasant who appears dejected and exhausted as he leans on his hoe, Markham’s poem was widely reprinted in newspapers, fueling a national debate about the treatment of labor in American society and the need for reform. Accusing the ruling class of moral failure, “The Man with the Hoe” is a protest poem, part of a tradition of literature concerned with social justice.

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“The Man with the Hoe” Summary

• The poet was inspired to write this poem after seeing "The Man with the Hoe," a painting by French artist Jean-Francois Millet from 1862.

  This epigraph is a quotation from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. It asserts that because human beings were created by God, their physical appearance is also God's.

  Years of hard work have left the laborer stooped over his hoe and staring at the ground, like many generations of laborers before him. His face expresses nothing, even as the rest of society depends on the harvest he reaps. Who, the speaker asks, is responsible for the fact that this man cannot experience the highs and lows of human emotion, can neither mourn loss nor have hopes for the future? Who made him into something like one of the farm animals, dumb and unfeeling? Who made his savage jaw hang open? Whose hands made his brows hang heavy? Who extinguished his ability to think? Is this the same being that God created to rule over the earth's natural resources, to gaze up at the stars and search for meaning, and to embrace life fully? Is this man really what God, who created the entire universe, intended when creating human beings? Even in the furthest stretches of Hell you would not find a worse shape than this man's body. There is no shape more marked by society's blind greed, no shape that more obviously represents a warning about humanity's soul. The condition of workers threatens to undermine the spiritual health of all.

  There are such huge distances between this man and the angels! Because he must work constantly in order to survive, he has no time for intellectual pursuits such as philosophy and astronomy. What could music, art, and beauty possibly mean to him? You can see the suffering of workers throughout the ages in his frightening body. The tragic oppression of the working class throughout all of history is reflected in his bent posture. His frightening body represents a betrayal of humanity itself, as he has been robbed, defiled, and denied a fair share of what he produces. However, workers like him resist exploitation by seeking justice, which foreshadows a future when history will look back on the current society as a failure.

  I am asking you, the most privileged people in society, the ruling class: how can you expect to receive divine blessings when you exploit workers in the way you have for so long, warping their bodies into something monstrous and snuffing out their soles? How do you plan to repair this body and revive its immortal soul? How do plan to raise its gaze from the ground and return the spark of light to its mind, to restore its joy and hope? How do you plan to atone for this ancient sin and fix the mess you made of God's creation?

  I ask you again, ruling class, how will future societies look back on the brutal and monstrous suffering you inflicted on the working class? How will the new world reckon with you when the time comes that the workers rise up and resist? What will become of those with so much power and wealth, those who inflicted all this suffering? After sinning for so long, how will you answer to God?

“The Man with the Hoe” Themes

• 

  The Exploitation of the Working Class

  “The Man with the Hoe” criticizes the exploitation of the working class. The poem was written at a time when extreme inequality prevailed in the United States, a period when wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a few while the average worker toiled away in poverty. The speaker is criticizing these circumstances, and calling on society to treat members of the working class as fellow human beings with a right to share in the products of their labor. What's more, the poem argues that, because God created all human beings "in His own image," the horrific treatment of the working class is an affront to God himself.

  The poem describes a worker whose body and mind have been warped by endless toil, highlighting the toll that manual labor has taken on this man in order to emphasize the brutal conditions faced by workers throughout history. The man is described as “dumb” (unable to speak) and “dead” to “rapture and despair.” He's like a farm animal, “stolid and stunned.” He “grieves not” and “never hopes,” and “the light within his brain” has been extinguished. The speaker even compares the man to a beast of burden and says he's been reduced to a “monstrous thing.” Basically, he has been robbed of conscious thought and emotion—of anything that makes him human.

  At the same time, the poem insists that this worker carries “the burden of the world” on his back, implying that his labor is essential for the functioning of society even as he's not allowed any of the benefits of that society. The man is solely a “Slave of the wheel of labor”—forced to focus on nothing but production in order to satisfy "the world’s blind greed."

  The blame for this situation, the poem insists, lies with the rich and powerful members of society—a ruling class of “lords” and “masters” who brutally exploit and dehumanize workers in the name of personal profit. Addressing the ruling class, “O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,” the speaker mockingly questions “the handiwork you give to God.” Capitalism’s brutal treatment of the laborer, in other words, has replaced divine creation (in God’s image) with something inhuman and "monstrous."

  The speaker asks why the laborer appears to be drained of feeling and spirit when he, too, is part of God’s creation. The exploitation of workers, the speaker thus argues, isn’t just an affront to ideals of equality and human decency; it’s an insult to God.

  The consequences are potentially grave. At the end of the poem, the speaker insists that society must one day “reckon” with the laborer’s condition—with the fact that profit-driven society has changed “Man” to “brute,” or, in other words, from a sensitive human being into a violent beast. The poem ultimately presents a stark choice: either the ruling class will act in accordance with Christian principles by treating the working class with dignity, or else society will perpetuate a cycle of suffering until the “hour” of divine judgment arrives. The workers class will inevitably rise up and "rebellion" will "shake the world"—and not even "kings" will be safe.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Man with the Hoe”

• Before Line 1, Lines 1-4

       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.   

  Before the poem begins, the speaker includes a quotation from the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis. This says that human beings were created in God's "own image"—that is, that all human beings are a reflection of God. Opening the poem with this quote makes the next lines all the more striking, since they describe a bent and broken man. This, the speaker seems to be asking, is what humanity has done to God's image?

  The poem's opening lines then describe the titular "man with a hoe" referenced in the poem's title. This man's body has been deformed and his mind has been exhausted by years of intense physical labor. The use of "centuries" reveals that the speaker isn't talking about an actual person, however; rather, the man in the painting represents all working people from across humanity history. Essentially, this man symbolizes the oppression and exploitation of the working class in general.

  The fact that his bent-over posture results from the strain of shouldering the "burden of the world" makes this oppression seem all the more unjust. The speaker is saying that laborers like this man produce the harvest that feeds humanity, yet this treatment is all the thanks they get.

  The poem's first line also establishes its meter, which is iambic pentameter. This means that each line contains five iambs, or units made up of one long or stressed syllable and one short or unstressed syllable. However, this meter isn't perfect. The very first foot in the poem, "Bowed by," stresses the first instead of the second syllable, creating trochee. The stresses in the first line thus read as follows:

  Bowed by | the weight | of cent- | uries | he leans

  By beginning the poem in this way, the poet places extra emphasis on the meaning of the first word, a burst of sound that suggests the force of gravity bends the worker's body into a bow, like a piece of wood.

  Alliteration and assonance also drive these lines forward, building the sense of how labor and time shape the worker's body. For example, the alliterative repetition of /h/ sounds (he; his hoe), /g/ sounds (gazes; ground), and /b/ sounds (back; burden) has the effect of identifying human features with tools and nature, suggesting how labor transforms the man's body into a tool in and of itself. Assonance in phrases such as "centuries he leans" and "ages in his face," highlight the changes in the worker's posture and facial expression as he labors over the course of long passages of time.

• Lines 5-10

  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?

  

  

• Lines 11-16

  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?

  

  

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• Lines 17-21

  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.

  

  

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• Lines 22-26

  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?

  

  

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• Lines 27-32

  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.

  

  

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• Lines 33-35

  O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,   
  is this the handiwork you give to God,
  This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ?

  

  

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• Lines 36-41

  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?

  

  

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• Lines 42-43

  O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
  How will the Future reckon with this Man?   

  

  

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• Lines 44-49

  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?

  

  

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“The Man with the Hoe” Symbols

• 

  Light and Vision

  Light and vision are referenced directly or alluded to multiple times throughout the poem and come to take on symbolic meanings. Put very simply, light and looking upward/the sky/the heavens are associated with life, truth, God, and human dignity. Light and sight are further connected to the poem's ideas regarding divine judgment, brought down by a God who is omniscient or able to see everything. By contrast, looking down, darkness, and blindness are all associated with ignorance, oppression, and sinfulness.

  Markham's epigraph, "Written after seeing Millet's World-Famous Painting," sets up the opening lines in which the worker "leans / Upon his how and gazes on the ground." The worker is physically bent, forced to lean over by the weight of "burden of the world" that rests "on his back." He is thus perpetually looking down, his gaze affixed on the dirt and soil, and this reflects his status as an oppressed "Slave to the wheel of labor." The speaker also emphasizes the exhausted, vacant expression in the worker's face, described as "The emptiness of ages." The light of his consciousness—"the light within his brain"—has been extinguished.

  The speaker says this is a perversion of what God meant for humanity upon its creation. Human beings are supposed to look upwards—to "trace the stars and search the heavens for power"—yet the laborer has no use for (and, indeed, cannot even look up to see) constellations like the "Pleiades." Vast "gulfs" exist between this laborer and "the seraphim," or angels up in Heaven, again implying that the working man is tethered to the ground.

  The poem blames the ruling class for denying the worker the ability to look at the sky in wonder, contrasting star-gazing with the vacant gaze of the worker in the fields. Because both classes are part of God's creation, according to the poem, it is a violation of the divine order that only some people are afforded "the upward looking and the light" while others are not.

  The ruling class becomes associated with darkness as well, however, in the mention of "the world's blind greed." Lack of sight is again connected here to spiritual degradation. Society has become so used to exploiting the working class that it no longer sees, or even cares about, the human damage caused by modern capitalism.

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“The Man with the Hoe” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Anaphora

  The poem uses anaphora often to emphasize its thematic ideas. For example, note the repetition of "Who"/"Whose" in the first stanza:

  Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
  ...
  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?

  These questions are rhetorical, and the speaker knows exactly who this "Who" is: the ruling class. The use of "Who"/"Whose" is a way to repeatedly call out this class, perhaps until the rulers own up to their sin. Think of the way a teacher might scold a misbehaving student by saying, "You know who you are."

  The repetition of "To" at the starts of lines 12-14 reflect the breadth of God's power and vision for humanity. Each "To" lays out another thing that human beings are meant to do, and each "To" also is something that that laborer is unable to do—thereby denying God's will.

  Later, the speaker uses anaphora of "More" in lines 19-21 to illustrate the worker's miserable condition, piling on the things that pale in comparison. Anaphora amplifies the sense of incomparable misery while also adding to its meaning. There is nothing "more" revealing of greed, nothing "more" ominous for the state of the human soul, and nothing "more" threatening to the universe, than the exploitation of the worker.

  The poem's final stanza uses anaphora to again pose a question repeatedly, heightening the effect of Markham's appeal to the moral conscience of the poem's reader. Lines 44, 45, and 47 all ask "How" history will look back on the state of the exploited worker. Through the emphasis of repetition, these questions suggest that society will fail to change in the ways the poem calls for. The phrases "How will" and "How answer" point to a future in which society's response to the crisis of labor exploitation is very much in doubt.

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• Rhetorical Question

  

  
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• Personification

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

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• Consonance

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

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• Allusion

  

  

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• Apostrophe

  

  

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"The Man with the Hoe" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Rapture
• Stolid
• Dominion
• Tongued
• Censure
• Portents
• Fraught
• Seraphim
• Dread
• Plundered
• Profaned
• Disinherited
• Protest
• Soul-quenched
• Immortality
• Immemorial infamies
• Perfidious wrongs
• Immedicable woes
• Reckon
• Brute question
• Dumb

• An experience, intensely felt, of joy or pleasure. For certain forms of Christianity, the rapture is the idea that with the second coming of Christ, the faithful will be raised up into heaven.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Man with the Hoe”

• Form

  "The Man with the Hoe" consists of four stanzas of different lengths. The poem does not follow one particular poetic form, but instead draws from several. It may be described as an English or irregular ode: a poem structured by stanzas of different lengths, whose meaning derives from its descriptive power. It is also a protest poem, addressing political or social issues of the day by offering a critique of injustice and the ruling classes on behalf of the oppressed. Finally, Markham writes in the mode of a jeremiad, a poem that laments the moral state of society and contains a prophecy of its downfall.

  Markham addresses the ruling class and society as a whole while describing the condition of the worker and the majesty of divine creation. What results is a dramatic contrast: the poem heightens its moral judgments by implicating its audience as responsible for the injustices they describe.

• Meter

  The poem's meter is blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. This means that its lines contain five poetic feet, each with a pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable: da DUM. However, the poem is not always consistent in this meter. For example, line 1 should be scanned as follows:

  Bowed by | the weight | of cent- | uries | he leans.

  The line begins with a stressed syllable (Bowed) followed by an unstressed syllable (by), before returning to a strict iambic pattern. Thus, the first beat is actually trochee, which is the inverse of the iamb: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.

  Line 2, meanwhile, is written in strict iambic pentameter. It should be scanned as follows:

  Upon | his hoe | and ga- | zes on | the ground,

  Broadly speaking, the poem's use of iambic pentameter elevates its tone. This is the same meter used by Shakespeare, after all; its use here lends the lines a noble, timeless quality. The variations throughout, meanwhile, serve to keep the long poem from feeling too stiff or stilted, and to draw attention to certain words. In the above example, for instance, the initial stress on "Bowed" underscores the intensity of the burden the laborer bears; it presses down on the line's meter itself.

• Rhyme Scheme

  "The Man with the Hoe" is written in blank verse, and as such has no rhyme scheme. Words and syllables at the ends of lines are different throughout the poem and follow each other in no particular order. A rigid rhyme scheme might feel too neat and tidy for a poem filled with such passion; the point here isn't necessarily to create beautiful-sounding language, but rather to fight for justice for the working class. Steady rhyme might theme seem overly lyrical and poetic. That said, the poem is still filled with elevated language. It liberally employs alliteration, assonance, and consonance throughout in order to emphasize various ideas and draw sonic connections across its lines.

“The Man with the Hoe” Speaker

• The poem's speaker can be thought of generally as a kind of moral witness: an observer of the world who addresses society at large in order to call down judgment on its sins. Because there is no explicit identification of the speaker in pronouns such as "I" or "we," the poem's perspective may be considered impersonal or third-person. Nevertheless, Markham makes the poem a vehicle for expressing the protest of the worker. For example, the final stanza poses the worker's "question" for society and "reply to God." Thus, the poem serves as a medium for a collective act of speech which otherwise might not be heard by Markham's literate audience. In other words, the poem seeks to reflect the plight of the working class, which cannot speak for itself.

  As such, the speaker is clearly not of this class. The speaker expresses sympathy for the laborer's plight while also remaining at a clear distance. The laborer is described as a broken, monstrous "Thing" whose body and mind have been bent by centuries of toil and exploitation. The speaker also draws on ideas from Social Darwinism to paint a picture of this man, whose external appearance—with its loose jaw and sloping brow—are meant to represent the worker's lack of intelligence and inner devastation. To modern readers, of course, such ideas are distinctly problematic. Nevertheless, the speaker does this to make clear that the laborer lacks the ability to protest in his own behalf.

“The Man with the Hoe” Setting

• The speaker begins the poem by describing a laborer bent over his hoe in a field. The poem's setting aims to be much broader than this, however, using this laborer to represent the working class throughout history. Indeed, the poem stretches back "centuries" as it describes the exploitation of workers. It brings the reader back to the moment of creation itself to underscore that these workers, too, are human beings made in God's image. Later the poem flashes forward into the future, where it predicts inevitable rebellion and judgment against those who dare continue with this exploitation. The poem can be thought of as encompassing all of human history, in a way.

  Of course, Markham was also responding to a specific moment, and the attitude of the poem's speaker reflects the increasingly industrialized economy of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. The actual artwork being described in the poem was painted between 1860-1862 in France, but Markham wrote this poem in the United States in 1899. The labor conditions Markham seeks to expose thus cross generations and national borders, and aren't tied to a single place.

Literary and Historical Context of “The Man with the Hoe”

• Literary Context

  This poem is Markham's most famous work, first published in 1899. Markham wrote the poem after seeing the French artist Jean-François Millet’s painting of the same title (1862), which depicts a slack-jawed peasant leaning on his hoe in a field.

  This is a protest poem, concerned with calling for justice for the working class rather than following a specific literary form. Praised by the populist politician, William Jennings Bryan, Markham was at the same time criticized by his friend, the journalist and essayist Ambrose Bierce, for making literary concerns second to those of social advocacy and reform. That is, Bierce felt his work was more concerned with ideas than actual poetry.

  In a way, this squares with the Moderism that began to take hold in the early 20th century. Modernist writers tended to reject strict dictates regarding what poetry actually is, often eschewing steady rhyme and meter. To be sure, Markham's verse features some very lofty language (and is written in blank verse), but it also is not overly concerned with following a specific poetic form.

  Historical Context

  Markham was a key literary figure in the early stages of the American Progressive Movement, which advocated for social reform and the rights of workers and women. The movement led to the formation of the nation's first large trade unions, the regulation of child labor, and women's suffrage.

  "The Man with the Hoe" made Markham internationally famous. After its debut at a poetry reading on New Year’s Eve in 1898, the poem was published in January 1899 in the San Francisco Examiner and met with immediate acclaim. Reprinted in newspapers across the United States and translated into 37 languages, "The Man with the Hoe" would become a battle cry for the American labor movement, appearing in newsletters and at meetings of workingmen’s associations. It even appeared in speeches by union leaders and the clergy.

  The poem quite obviously draws from socialist rhetoric, and Markham himself was allegedly radicalized in part after reading Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto). In a capitalist society, the "means of production"—basically, raw materials, factories, etc.; the things used to produce economic value—are privately owned. Those owners are represented here by the "masters, lords and rulers in all lands" whom Markham addresses at the end of the poem. These "rulers" aren't actually doing the work themselves, yet they're the ones enjoying all the profits.

  Think of a man who owns acres of land that are farmed by poor laborers. Those laborers are the ones actually tilling the fields, but because they don't own the land itself—the means of production—they don't get to share in any excess profits, which instead go to the landowner. The "man with the hoe" in this poem is clearly not profiting from his work; instead, as a "Slave" to labor, he's working simply to survive. One tenet of socialist and anti-capitalist thinking is that workers should own the means of production, that workers like the man in this poem shouldn't be forced to transform themselves into beasts of burden in order to fill the "world's blind greed."

More “The Man with the Hoe” Resources

• External Resources

  • Markham in California — More details about Markham's life, including photos and additional poems.

  • Relationships and Influences — Markham's aesthetics may have gone out of style, but his influence lives on. Learn more at Poetry Out Loud.

  • The "World-Famous Painting" — See Jean-François Millet's painting that inspired this poem.

  • Markham's Life Story — At the Poetry Foundation, a biography and overview of Markham's career

  • The American Labor Movement — Learn more about the history of labor in the United States.