Edwin Markham (1852–1940,) born Charles Edward Anson Markham, was an American poet and lecturer best known for his poem “The Man with the Hoe,” on the brutality of harsh work.
Born in Oregon City, Oregon, Markham grew up on an isolated valley ranch in the Suisun hills in central California. He was a member of the first graduating class (1872) at San Jose Normal School, now called San Jose State University. He became first a teacher and then a school administrator.
In 1899, Markham gained national fame with the publication in the San Francisco Examiner of “The Man with the Hoe.” Inspired by French painter Jean-François Millet’s L’homme à la houe, Markham made the French peasant the symbol of the exploited classes worldwide. Its success enabled Markham to devote himself to writing and lecturing—in which he concerned himself with social and industrial problems.
Markham’s first book of verse, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899,) followed Lincoln and Other Poems (1901.) Markham read its lead poem “Lincoln, the Man of the People” at the dedication (1922) of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Markham’s further volumes—Shoes of Happiness (1915,) Gates of Paradise (1920,) New Poems: Eighty Songs at Eighty (1932,) and The Star of Araby (1937)—lack the passion of the early works. The Markham papers are at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York. Biographies include William L. Stidger’s Edwin Markham (1933.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Edwin Markham
Whoever falls from God’s right hand is caught into his left.
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Faith, Divinity, God
We all are blind until we see
That in the human plan
Nothing is worth the making if
It does not make the man.
Why build these cities glorious
If man unbuilded goes?
In vain we build the world, unless
The builder also grows.
—Edwin Markham
Choices are the hinges of destiny.
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Decisions
I fear the vermin that shall undermine
Senate and citadel and school and shrine.
—Edwin Markham
For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear—
When you are the hammer, strike.
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Preparation, Planning
Teach me, Father, how to go
Softly as the grasses grow;
Hush my soul to meet the shock
Of the wild world as a rock;
But my spirit, propt with power,
Make as simple as a flower.
Let the dry heart fill its cup,
Like a poppy looking up;
Let life lightly wear her crown,
Like a poppy looking down,
When its heart is filled with dew,
And its life begins anew.
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Flowers
We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.
—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?
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Farming
The crest and crowning of all good, life’s final star, is Brotherhood.
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Humanity
The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun-illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Faith
Ah, great it is to believe the dream as we stand in youth by the starry stream; but a greater thing is to fight life through and say at the end, the dream is true!
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Dreams
There is a destiny that makes us brothers:
None goes his way alone:
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back onto our own.
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Humanity
There is a destiny that makes us brothers:
None goes his way alone:
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back onto our own.
—Edwin Markham
Oft when the white, still dawn lifted the skies and pushed the hills apart, I have felt it like a glory in my heart.
—Edwin Markham
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.
—Edwin Markham
Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Adversity, Defeat
He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.
—Edwin Markham
Topics: Love
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Dorothy Parker American Humorist, Journalist
Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American Poet
John Jay Chapman American Writer
Robert Frost American Poet
Emily Dickinson American Poet
Gertrude Stein American Writer
Theodore Roethke American Poet
Edgar Allan Poe American Poet
Witter Bynner American Poet