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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 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 with light?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its 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 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 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-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 dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries

I tried to post a picture of the painting but it didn't work but you can see it here.

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=879&handle=li

Here is my submission for today.


Abou Ben Adhem

By: James Henry Leigh Hunt

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said
"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still, and said "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Written after seeing Millet's World-Famous Painting

God made man in His own image,
in the image of God made He him. --Genesis.

Written by whom? If it is your work then you are as talented as you said you were.

I can only wish I could write like that.

"[A]s I have never seen anything but fields since I was born, I try to say as best I can what I saw and felt when I was at work," wrote Jean-François Millet. At the Salon of 1863, Man with a Hoe caused a storm of controversy. The man in the picture was considered brutish and frightening by Parisian bourgeoisie. The Industrial Revolution had caused a steady exodus from French farms, and Man with a Hoe was interpreted as a socialist protest about the peasant's plight. Though his paintings were judged in political terms, Millet declared that he was neither a socialist nor an agitator.

A religious fatalist, Millet believed that man was condemned to bear his burdens. This farmer is Everyman. His face is lit, yet composed of blots of color that give him no individuality. He is big and dirty and utterly exhausted by the backbreaking 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, Man with a Hoe was long considered a symbol of the laboring class. "

In 1899 an American schoolteacher, Charles Edward Anson Markham (1852-1940), who used the penname Edwin Markham, was inspired by an 1863 painting to write a poem. The painting was "L'homme à la houe" by the French artist, Jean-François Millet (1814-1875); the poem was "The Man with a Hoe".

I am familiar with the painting, just never saw the poem before. Thanks for the info.

Would be nice to see some of your own work here though.

ok Ginger, you asked for it. Here's a little something I wrote a few years ago. It's short and bittersweet.

The Man In The Mirror

Who's that old man in the mirror
looking back at me?

That's surely not the face
I ever thought I'd see

Where's the little boy
I used to know so well?

If only you could speak
surely you would tell

I can wipe the grimey dust
that settles on the glass

But how to wipe away the years
that have come to pass

Goddamn you mirror
why DO you treat me thus?

Go ahead, who cares
mock me if you must