International Journal of English

and Literature (IJEL)

ISSN(P): 2249-6912; ISSN(E): 2249-8028
Vol. 5, Issue 4, Aug 2015, 97-102
TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.

(RE) DEFINING THE VISUAL LANGUAGE: AN EKPHRASTIC READING OF

EDWIN MARKHAMS POEM THE MAN WITH THE HOE
JEETHA JOHNY CHUNGATH
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Prajyoti Niketan College, Pudukad, Trichur, Kerala, India

ABSTRACT
Modernism is concerned with the convergence of several levels of representation. In the existing milieu of
globalization, it has become imperative for disciplines to break the rigid wall of compartmentalization. Literature, music
and performing arts find a common aesthetic space in the ekphrastic mode of art. Thus ekphrasis aims at encapsulating the
various art forms into a single entity. Ekphrasis is the sub genre of poetry addressing existent or imaginary works of art.
Ekphrasis in a wider context is the natural outcome of the strong bond in western art between poetry and visual arts. As an
illustration of this genre, this paper presents an ekphrastic reading of the poem namely Edwin Markhams The Man with
the Hoe.

KEYWORDS: Ekphrasis, (Re) Define, Visual Representation, Rhetoric, Hoe Man, Betrayed Humanity
INTRODUCTION
Modernism is concerned with the convergence of several levels of representation, telescoping and collapsing
various art forms into a single focus. Such a tendency of modernism is well showcased in the ekphrastic representational
strategies. As a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing
its essence and forms, ekphrasis relates more directly to the audience through its illuminative liveliness. In the existing
milieu of globalization, it has become imperative for disciplines to break the rigid wall of compartmentalization. Literature,
music and performing arts find a common aesthetic space in the ekphrastic mode of art. Thus ekphrasis aims at
encapsulating the various art forms into a single entity.
Ekphrasis has been the comeback kid of ancient rhetorical terms as one of its major contemporary critics put it
(Hefferman, 219). Murray Krieger in his seminal study, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural sign, uses the term as every
attempt, within an art of words, to work toward the illusion that it is performing a task we usually associate with art of
natural signs. The natural sign gives the illusion that it can operate without a code, that it is transparent and renders its
referent in an immediate manner like the iconic sign that, somehow resembles its referent.
James Hefferman reminds us that since the picture of a moment in a story usually presupposed the viewers
knowledge of the story as a whole, ekphrasis commonly tells this story for the benefit of those who dont know it, moving
well beyond what the picture by itself implies. Ekphrasis is not merely the verbal representation of the graphic design. The
need to verbally represent the visual is a form of seeking legitimacy of sorts. Comparisons between the visual and the
verbal arts and the barrier between poetry and painting have long been a source of theoretical debate and have engendered
a particularly large body of critical commentary. In other words, the ekphrasis genre has become an important focus of
attention in contemporary critical discourse.
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Jeetha Johny Chungath

Ekphrasis (also spelled ecphrasis) is a direct transcription from the Greek ek, out of, and phrasis, speech or
expression. Its often been translated simply as description, and seems originally to have been used as a rhetorical term
designating a passage in prose or poetry that describes something. More narrowly, it could designate a passage providing a
short speech attributed to a mute work of visual art. In recent decades, the use of the term has been limited, first, to visual
description and then even more specifically to the description of a real or imagined work of visual art.
The use of visual description in poetry is a huge subject and a good treatment of the topic is found in Carol T.
Christs The Finer Optic. Descriptions, in poems, of works of music, cinema, or choreography might also qualify as
instances of ekphrasis. But these notes will be concerned only with descriptions of works of visual art in a poem, not with
description in general, or with description of other kinds of art.
Horace, in his Epistles, writes a verse letter to his friend Pisos, the opening lines of which develop the metaphor of
painting as a means of criticizing arbitrary combinations of incompatible components in a poem. Beginning at line 361, in
a passage includes the phrase ut pictura poesis (like a picture, poetry, or poetry is like a painting). Horace makes a
comparison between the two arts. These lines are often cited as the foundational text establishing a connection between
visual and verbal art.
The earliest and best known example of ekphrasis is the long description of the shield made by Hephaestus and
given to Achilles by his mother Thetis (Book 18 of the Iliad). Low- relief sculpture embossed in metal on the surface of the
shield is described in elaborate detail.
Similar to Homers description of Achilles shield is the description in Book I of Virgils Aeneid, beginning at line
450, of the carvings on the wall of the temple Aeneas visits when he first comes to Carthage. Depicted are scenes from the
Trojan War, which alert the exiled hero to the fact that the story of the Trojan War and hi part in it are already legendary.
Another notable instance of ekphrasis occurs in Canto X of Dantes Purgatorio, where the pilgrim poet describes low relief
sculptures in white marble carved on the side of the mountain of purgatory, next to its upward track. These carvings depict
Biblical and classical examples of the virtue of humility: the Annunciation, David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant,
and the Roman Emperor Trojan addressing the mother of a soldier who has been killed. Another classic example of
ekphrasis occurs in Book III of Spencers The Faerie Queene, which is concerned with the virtue of chastity. After Milton,
when epic-length poems become rarer in English language poetry, the use of ekphrasis is limited to shorter poems, for
example, Marvells The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers; or Keats Ode on A Grecian Urn, On Seeing the
Elgin Marbles Shelleys On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery; and Brownings My Last
Duchess. But some long poems as well include them, for example, Byrons Childe Harolds Pilgrimage.
In the two English-language cases where a poet was also a painter, ekphrastic poems were actually conceived as
accompaniments to an actual painting or vice versa. Blakes The Tiger, The Clod and the Pebble and Holy Thursday, for
example, were first printed underneath or alongside Blakes graphic rendering of the poems subject. What have been
called Blakes composite works also influenced Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who provided verse equivalents to several of his
paintings, the texts often inscribed below the picture or within it. Usually the execution of the painting came first, as in The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin. With the Blessed Damozel, the poem preceded the painting.
In the twentieth century many poets produced ekphrastic poems, and the vast majority of these concern actual, not
imaginary works of art. Rilkes Archaic Torso of Apollo; Marianne Moores No Swan so Fine and Nine Peaches; Wallace

Impact Factor (JCC): 4.4049

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Stevens Angel Between Two Paysans; William Carlo Williams Pictures from Breughel; John Berrymans Hunters in the
Snow; W. H. Audens The Shield of Achilles and Elizabeth Bishops Large Bad Picture and Poem.
A poem can provide new aspects for a work of visual art. It can provide a special angle of approach not usually
brought to bear on the original. More generally, a poem can add the overall resources of verbosity, with descriptions
developed through surprising metaphors, apt commentary cast in lines with unusual diction and crisp rhythm. Perhaps the
most effective contemporary poems dealing with visual art are those where the authors include themselves in the poem,
recounting the background circumstances that led to a viewing of the painting or sculpture in question; or what memories
or associations or emotions it stirs in them; or how they might wish the work to be different from what it is. The centre of
attention in this kind of poem isnt solely the pre-existing work but instead is dual, sharing the autobiographical focus
found in the majority of contemporary lyric poems written in English.
Poems like these unite ekphrasis with the autobiographical tradition, which is equally ancient and probably more
important than ekphrasis alone. After all, the autobiographical tradition can cite figures such as Ovid, Donne, George
Herbert, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Lowell, Roethke, Adrienne Rich and Seamus Heaney. Of course one
can argue that an ekphrastic poem providing no information at all about the author may still convey autobiographical
content indirectly, in the form of voice, tone, level of diction, and the kind and frequency of judgments made in the course
of presentation.
Ekphrasis is the sub genre of poetry addressing existent or imaginary works of art. Ekphrasis in a wider context is
the natural outcome of the strong bond in western art between poetry and visual arts. As an illustration of this genre, this
paper presents an ekphrastic reading of the poem namely Edwin Markhams The Man with the Hoe.
Edwin Markham, who has been called the dean of American poets, received worldwide fame when he
published his poem The Man with the Hoe. It is a creation based on the painting Lhomme a la houe by Jean Francois
Millet, in which a French peasant toils in the field. The painting depicts a bent and broken peasant leaning on his hoe in a
vast rocky wasteland. Markham wrote about the oil in canvas: I saw in it the symbol of betrayed humanity (RW, 1). In
this poem, Markham had originally equated the French peasant with the American farm labourer in a plea for agrarian
reform. The poem was first presented as a public poetry reading at a New Years Eve Party in 1898, and published soon
afterwards. Markham's The Man with the Hoe is the one American poem of protest against abusive working conditions
almost universally remembered. What the poet does in the poem is to relate the singular image of the peasant to an
expansive one and back to a singular one again -- as though to dig for apparent meaning.
In Markhams Reflections on Writing the Man with the Hoe he says, I say in the heading of every authorized
copy of the poem that it was written after seeing Millets picture, The Man with the Hoe I am often asked how I came to
write The Man with the Hoe. I am myself in a limited sense one of the "Hoemanry." During all my early manhood I was a
workingman under hard and incorrigible conditions. The smack of the soil and the whir of the forge are in my blood. I
know every coign and cranny of ranch and range. The breaking of the ground with the plow, the sowing and harrowing of
the seed, the watching of the skies for omens of the weather, the heading and threshing of the wheat, the piling of the haymowsI know all these things. I know also the whistle of the sun-burnt boy going to hunt the cows, the lyrical shout of
the meadow lark in the field of grain, and the ripple of the poppies in the wheat.

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These things are sweet and deep in memory, but I know also the prose of the farm. I know the hard, endless work
in the hot sun, the chilling rain; I know the fight against the Death-Clutch reaching to take the home when crops have failed
or prices fallen. I know the loneliness of the stretching plain, with the whirl of the dust under foot and the whirl of the
hawk overhead. I know the dull sense of hopelessness that beats upon the heart in that monotonous drudgery that leads
nowhere, that has no light ahead (RW, 1-2).
The Hoe man is the symbol of betrayed humanity, the toiler ground down through ages of oppression, through
ages of social injustice. He is the man pushed away from the land by those who fail to use the land, till at last he has
become a serf, with no mind in his muscle and no heart in his handiwork. He is the man pushed back and shrunken up by
the special privileges conferred upon the few. His battle has not been confined to his own life: it extends backward in grim
and shadowy outline through his long train of ancestry. It evokes the labouring of much of humanity using symbolism of a
labourer leaning upon his hoe, burdened by his work, but receiving little rest or reward.
In How I wrote The Man with the Hoe, Markham writes, In Millets great painting The Man With the Hoe, I saw
that Millet had swept his canvas bare of everything that was merely pretty, and projected this startling figure before us in
all its rugged and savage reality. I was drawn and held by the terror of it: I saw in it the symbol of betrayed humanity. I
immediately jotted down in my large notebook a few of the opening lines of my poem. They set the Hoe-man before us as
Millet saw him on the fields of France. The few opening words were just enough to hold the place, enough to nail fast my
purpose to write a poem that should cry the lost rights of the toiling multitude in the abyss of civilizationthe multitude
helplessly chained to the present, fettered to their narrow field, deprived of the enlarging education of the mind, deprived
of the ennobling education of the heart (2-3).
Bowed by the weight of centuries he lean
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back, the burden of the world. (The Man with the Hoe, 1-4).
The poet is going for a very broad rhetoric with general terms like "centuries" and "emptiness" appropriated to the
man in the portrait who has now become more of a symbol for the reader to sympathize with. It has been called the battlecry of the next thousand years and translated into more than 30 languages.
In the Hoe man we see the slow, sure, awful degradation of man through endless, hopeless and joyless labour. The
Hoe man is the effigy of man, a being with no outlet to his life, no uplift to his soul- a being with no time to rest, no time to
think, no time to pray, no time for the mighty hopes that make us men. The poet gives a heart-rending portrait of the
miserable plight of the hoe man. The poet throws a series of rhetorical questions at the humanity for the centuries of
exploitation and insult heaped on the peasantry that has sacrificed everything in order to feed the world. The series of
rhetorical questions throw light on the unpardonable sins committed against the soul-quenched workers of the world.
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;

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(Re) Defining the Visual Language: An Ekphrastic Reading

of Edwin Markhams Poem the Man with the Hoe

To feel the passion of Eternity?

Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? (The Man with the Hoe, 11-16).
This farmer is Everyman. His face is lit, yet composed of blots of colour that give him no individuality. He is big
and dirty and utterly exhausted by the back-breaking work of turning this rocky, thistle-ridden earth into a productive field
like the one being worked in the distance. A tribute to dignity and courage in the face of a life of unremitting exertion, The
Man with a Hoe was long considered a symbol of the labouring class. The labourer serves as a symbol of a hard deprived
life as mankind toils in the field. It is a striking poem of protest against exploited labour with a focus on Americas
working class and their sufferings. A conception of the exploited, oppressed peasant down the ages, the poem was a protest
against the changing conditions of labour in rural and urban America. Centuries of exploitation has reduced the peasant to
an inanimate object. The poet asks,
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? (The Man with the Hoe, 5-7).
The main theme of the poem is that hard physical labour without any reward completely dehumanizes an
individual:
There is no shape more terrible than thisMore tongued with cries against the worlds blind greedMore filled with signs and portents for the soulMore packed with danger to the universe. (The Man with the Hoe, 18-21).
The labourer does not utter a word. His presence is riveting but altogether determined by his victimhood.
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Times tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited (The Man with the Hoe, 27-30).
The relentless othering of the worker persists throughout the poem despite Markhams evident outrage at his
exploitation. It is that consistent othering of the worker,
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? (The Man with the Hoe, 8-10).
That made the poem widely acceptable at the time and earned it partial acceptance within the dominant cultures
literary canon for so long. The list of rhetorical questions transforms the peasant into the beast of burden. As a mute object
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of sympathy, the worker has no role in establishing the meaning of his suffering. Indeed, this poem represented a form of
literary dissent a protest against the changing conditions of labour in rural and urban America. The history of indigenous
labour protest and song is forgotten and Markham instead speaks on behalf of mute suffering. It is the poems address that
raises the possibility. The poem ends with a prophecy that time is not far when this dumb Terror will rise to judge the
world. It will be the dawn of a brave new world.
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries? (The Man with the Hoe, 48-49).
As demonstrated by the powerful public response to both Markhams poem and Millets painting, the
representation of the worker both literary and visual, served as a lightening rod in the struggle over social change. The
poem is equally successful at issuing a broad revolutionary warning to capitalists and politicians.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? (The Man with the Hoe, 42-45)

CONCLUSIONS
The poem, The Man with the Hoe, thus locates the act of viewing the visual art in a particular place and time,
giving it a personal and perhaps even a historical context. The result is then not merely a verbal photocopy of the original
painting, sculpture or photograph, but instead a grounded instance of seeing, shaped by forces outside the artwork. In such
a poem, description of the original work remains partial, but the poet add to it aspects drawn from his own experience the
facts, reflections and feelings that arise at the confluence of a work of visual art and the life of the poet.

REFERENCES
1.

Becker, Andrew Sprague. (1995). The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield

2.

Fischer, Barbara K. (2006). Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry. New
York: Routledge

3.

Hefferman, James. (1993). Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: UCP

4.

Krieger, Murray. (1992). Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP

5.

Markham, Edwin. (1925).Reflections on Writing the Man with the Hoe. New York: Doubleday & Mc Clure Co

6.

Markham, Edwin. (19A15). The Man with the Hoe The Little Book of American Poets: 1787-1900. Ed. Jessie
B. Rittenhouse. Cambridge: Riverside Press

7.

Nelson, Cary. (2001). Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. New York: Routledge

8.

Stidger, William Le Roy. (1933). Edwin Markham. The Abingdon Press

9.

Wynne, Robert. (2005). Imaginary Ekphrasis. Columbus, OH: Pudding House Publications

Impact Factor (JCC): 4.4049

Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 3.0