THE MAN WITH THE HOE WRITTEN AFTER SEEING THE PAINTING BY MILLET God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him. — GENESIS. BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans And on his back the burden of the world. 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 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 stoop; Through this dread shape humanity be trayed, Plundered, profaned, and disinherited, O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands, How will you ever straighten up this shape; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; |