Question

100 POINTS

What is Markham's attitude in his poem "The Man with the Garden Tool" toward those in power?
Here's the whole poem:

The Man with the Garden Tool
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 garden tool 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 with light?
Down all the stretch of the bad place to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with cries against 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!
Worker 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 Powers that made 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 speechless Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?

—Edwin Markham

Answer 1

This makes the poem (The Man with the Garden Tool) an ekphrasis, or an example of a poem inspired by, or that describes, a piece of art. The poem can also be considered a protest poem, one that is concerned with social justice. Specifically, the poet is concerned with the treatment of the working class. A the time it as published, the poem was widely printed in newspapers and helped to start a new debate about labor and the distribution of wealth in America.

He focuses on how spiritually exhausted this man seems. He’s lost, without either hope or sorrow. The world has taken his soul from him, and Markham is determined to express his outrage. Through a series of questions, he challenges the listener to do something about this state of affairs. What are you, he asks, going to do to amen sure you can face future generations and God without shame?