The Man with the Hoe

After all these years, All you can remember are the songs and poems you memorized. Some hate repetitions.So I dare you, read this once and memorize. Can you? The key to perfection is repetition. Want to acquire a skill, and be a master, therefore do it repeatedly.

The Man with the Hoe by Edwin Markham
Third Year English subject
Santa Cruz Academy
Zambales, PHL
Year 1992
Teacher: Ms. Patricia Marty

http://www.vggallery.com/painting/p_0648.htm

The Man With The Hoe by Edwin Markham

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 marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
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 the 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 a 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 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?



The Man with the Hoe

Fourth Year HS poems

COMMUNICATION ARTS IN ENGLISH

Ms. Lourdes Merin

Now Mrs. Lourdes Merin Monta

(teacher)

Jean Monta Melgar

Fourth Year-A

Santa Cruz Academy

Sta. Cruz, Zambales

                School Year 1992 – 1993, we were Fourth Year high school students in Santa Cruz Academy, Sta. Cruz, Zambales when we were given these poems to study, memorize and interpret. Two of these poems we need to recite with a partner. They were titled “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and “Her Reply”.  I was looking for something in our bodega when I come across  my 4^th year HS notebook. So I copied these poems, encoded them and shared to our group. They bring back memories of way back then, 20 years ago.

LOVE HAVE I KNOWN

By Toribia Maño

Love have I known as birds have known their skies

In lush of spring and in the summer’s fall

In a gray field of rain and sun drenched wall

I have watched petals fall and new moons rise

And these I found that although I am wise

To all the ways of love, I know not all-

But like a child still grope and heed the call

Of magic sunlight dancing in my eyes

And love is this; a sun that burns and sets

A kingdom greater than a pile of gold

Or name written in fire or flag unfurled

Or silver stars across vast orbits hurled

And love is this too: strength that one begets

By toil, fear, ecstasy the heart can hold.

THE RHODORA

In May, when sea winds pierce our solitudes,

I found the fresh rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay,
Here might the redbird come his plumes cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky;
Fill them, dear, that if eyes were made seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being.

Why thou were there, O Rival of the rose?

I never thought to ask, I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose,
The self-same power that brought me there brought you.

The Rhodora" is an 1847 poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a response to the question "on being asked whence is the flower". The poem is about the rhodora, a common flowering shrub, and the beauty of this shrub in its natural setting.

THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE

Christopher Marlowe

Come live with me and be my Love,

And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,

And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow river, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

 And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies
A cap of flowers and a kertle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair lined slipper for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

 A belt of straw and ivy buds

With coral clasps and amber studs
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

 The shepherd swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May morning;
If these delights thy mind may move
Then live with me and be my love.

HER REPLY

Sir Walter Raleigh

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every shepherds tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be Thy love.

But Time drives flocks from field to fold

When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb,
The rest complains of cares to come

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields

To wayward winter reckoning yields
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrows fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds

Thy coral clasps and amber studs
All these in no mean can
To come to thee and be thy Love.

But could youth last, and love still heed.
Had joys no date, nor age no need
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with me thee and be thy Love.