California's Edwin Markham
A talk delivered at the dedication of the Edwin Markham House, San Jose, CA, 5/26/02

Jack Foley

Edwin Markham, the youngest of ten children, was born in Oregon City, Oregon on April 23, 1852. His father died when he was four, and he was raised in California. Markham attended rural schools before finding work as a farm laborer. He writes, “I knew none of my kinsmen (save my parents), and was reared entirely out of the family traditions, from pioneer stock that had pushed West and farther West from Connecticut to Illinois, from Illinois to the Pacific shore.” Markham writes that he knew the “poetry of farm life”--“all sorts of rich, keen knowledge...--woodcraft and weather-wit, the friendship of animals, a love for the hoe and the fresh-turned furrow”--but he also knew “the prose”:

the hard, endless work in the hot sun, the leak in the roof that cannot be stopped because there is no money in the purse, the merciless clutch of hunger when the last crust was gone from the cupboard. I know what it means to fight against the despair of the heart when the mortgage is overdue and the prices of products have fallen. I know the loneliness of the stretching plain, with the whirl of the dust underfoot, and the whirl of the hawks overhead; the dull sense of hopelessness that beats upon the heart in that monotonous drudgery that leads nowhere, that has no light ahead.

In 1868 Markham entered California College, and after graduating four years later, he became a teacher at San Luis. This was followed by periods in Santa Rosa and Coloma before he was appointed headteacher of a school in Hayward.

Markham’s poetry was published in the Overland Monthly and Scribner’s Magazine. On January 15, 1899, his most famous poem, “The Man with the Hoe”--inspired by the painting by Jean Francois Millet, which Markham saw in a San Francisco exhibition--appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. Markham describes the poem as about “the terrible unmaking of man...Why should so many go down under the wheel of the world to hopeless ruin?” Originally written in rhyme, the poem was revised into blank verse, though, Markham writes, “two pairs of the old rhymes are still in the poem. It seemed impossible to cast them out”:

The typewritten manuscript of the finished poem came home to me on New Year’s Day, 1899. That evening I went to a gathering of literary friends at Mr. Carroll Carrington’s in San Francisco. I was urged to read my ink-wet “Man with the Hoe,” although I protested that it was too funereal for a New Year’s greeting. Mr. Bailey Millard, literary editor of the San Francisco Examiner, was present, and when I had done reading he asked to see the thing, and took it all in again with his eyes. The next Sunday I was at his home in the mountains above Saucelito [sic]. Then he asked if he might have the poem for the Sunday edition of his paper, saying that the managing editor had commissioned him to get it...I accepted the offer, as I was pleased to be able to reach a popular audience with this Poem of the People...[The poem] was accompanied with a good reproduction of the Millet picture and an appreciative editorial wherein Mr. Millard said kind, bold words concerning the lines.

            --“How and Why I Wrote ‘The Man with the Hoe,” The Saturday Evening Post (12/16/1899)

In his book, Archetype West the poet William Everson wrote, “[I]t was Markham’s direct reading that moved the editor of the San Francisco Examiner to instigate the breakthrough publication of ‘The Man with the Hoe.’ So it would be with [Allen Ginsberg’s] Howl, which was ‘published’ when it was first read in the old Six Gallery in the San Francisco Marina in the fall of 1955, and which gained a powerful reputation on platform well before it was issued in print.” More recently, Dana Gioia’s essay, “Fallen Western Star” described the poem as “extraordinary”: “vivid, forceful compressed, and deeply moving”:

No American poet--and especially no poet of the Gilded Age--provided a truer prophecy of the bitter social turmoil of the early twentieth century...Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe” was and remains the quintessential [San Francisco] Bay Area poem--a representative work for the best that would follow over the next century. It offers a populist and progressive but unillusioned view of existence. It dramatizes the lone individual against the system without idealizing the protagonist into an unrealistically noble figure...The style is both visionary and naturalistic. The concerns are moral and political. The manner of the poem is quite contemporary for the late Victorian era, and yet its modernity is deeply rooted in the past. The poetic and ideological allegiances are thoroughly cosmopolitan, as much international as American. Finally, the poem is conceived for oral delivery--it is accessible, dramatic, and auditory. These same qualities can be found, mutatis mutandis, in later Northern Californian poets....

The publication of “The Man with the Hoe” brought Markham considerable fame and led to the publication of his first collection, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899). It also precipitated his move to the East Coast, to Staten Island, where he would remain until his death on March 7, 1940. Markham’s poem, “Lincoln, Man of the People,” also struck a responsive chord with readers and contributed to their popularity of his next volume, Lincoln, and Other Poems (1901). Later collections--The Shoes of Happiness (1914), California the Wonderful (1915), The Gates of Paradise (1920), Ballad of the Gallows Bird (1926), and Eighty Songs at Eighty (1932)--were less successful. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that Markham’s later volumes “have the commanding rhetoric but lack the passion of the early works.” His Collected Poems appeared in 1940.

Edwin Markham’s concern for the welfare of the underdog made him popular with radicals. Progressive journalist Benjamin Flower described him as “democracy’s greatest poet”--a title we might prefer to reserve for Walt Whitman. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry suggests that Markham was early influenced by John Ruskin, William Morris and Karl Marx. Children of Bondage, a book on the exploitation of young workers which the poet co-wrote with Ben Lindsey, George Creel and Owen Lovejoy, is considered to have influenced the federal government’s attempts to control child labor.

In a note to his poem, “Song to the Divine Mother,” Edwin Markham wrote,

This song should be read in the light of the deep and memorable truth that the Divine Feminine as well as the Divine Masculine Principle is in God--that he is Father-Mother, Two-in-One. It follows from this truth that the dignity of womanhood is grounded in the Divine Nature itself. The fact that the Deity is Man-Woman was known to the ancient poets and sages, and was grafted into the nobler religions of mankind. The idea is implied in the doctrine of the Divine Father, taught by our Lord in the Gospels; and it is declared in the first chapter of Genesis in the words: “God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.’...So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.”

I know by the stir of the branches
            The way she went;
And at times I can see where a stem
            Of the grass is bent.
She’s the secret and light of my life,
            She allures to elude;
But I follow the spell of her beauty
            Whatever the mood.
 
I have followed all night in the hills,
            And my breath is deep,
But she flies on before like a voice
            In the vale of sleep.
I follow the print of her feet
            In the wild river bed,
And lo, she calls gleefully down
            From a cliff overhead.

I’ll conclude my presentation by reading the final version of “The Man with the Hoe.” For Markham, the word “Terror” is a reference to the French Revolution. For us, in our post 9/11 world, the word retains a genuine frisson.

THE MAN WITH THE HOE
Written after seeing Millet's world-famous painting of a brutalized toiler
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.
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 markt their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their 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 packt with danger 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?
Thru this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Thru this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of 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-quencht?
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 all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

© Jack Foley, May 2002