THE MAN WITH THE HOE.

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 19, 22 November 1913, Page 4

THE MAN WITH THE HOE.

(By Chas. E. Markham.)

(Printed by Request.)

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 pillared the blue firmament wfith light ? Down all the stretch of hell to its last gulf There is no form 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 labour, 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 ag*es 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.

0 masters, lords and rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing, distorted and soul-

quenched P How will you ever straighten up this shape? Give back the upward-looking and the light; Rebuild it in the music and the dreams, Touch it again with immortality; Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes ?

0 masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the future reckon with the Man? Mow answer his brute question in that hour VY hen the whirlwinds of rebellion shake the

world ; Mow will it be with kingdoms and with kings, V> hi* those who shape him to the thing he is, G lien this dumb Terror shall reply to God, After the silence of the centuries?