THE MAN WITH THE HOE
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the groimd.
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 lot down his brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within his 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 powers;
To feel the passion oi Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And pillared the blue firmament with light?
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 menace 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 sloop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed.
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries 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;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Touch it again with immortality;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
