THE SONG OF THE SHOVEL

Down on creation's muck-pile where the sinful swelter and sweat,

Where the scum of the earth foregather, rough and untutored yet,

Where they swear in the six-foot spaces, or toil in the barrow squad,

The men of unshaven faces, the ranks of the very bad; Where the brute is more than the human, the muscle more than the mind,

Where their gods are the loud-voiced gaffers, rugged, uncouth, unkind;

Where the rough of the road are roosting, where the failed and the fallen be,

There have we met in the ditchway, there have I plighted with thee,

The wage-slave troth of our union, and found thee true to my trust,

Stoic in loveless labor, companion when beggared and burst,

Wonderful navvy shovel, last of tools and the first.

Your grace is the grace of a woman, you 're strong as the oak is strong;

Wonderful unto the navvy, the navvy who sings your

song

Forever patient, and ready to do what your master bids, Though you labored at Beni Hassan, and wrought at the Pyramids,

Uprearing the Grecian Temple, the gold Byzantium dome, The palaces proud of Susa, the legended walls of Rome, In the earliest days of Egypt, in evil-starred Nineveh,

When your masters who be were whirling, inane in the

Milky Way,

In Pompeii of the sorrows, ere the lava of hate was hurled From the fiery mouth of the mountain, in the passionate days of the world.

Wonderful, ancient shovel, tool of the labor slave!

To you the sparkle of silver the hammer and furnace gave; For you the virginal forest was stripped of its stateliest

trees,

And you have the temper that flame has, and you have the graces of these.

Athens and Rome have known you, London and Paris know;

You'll raise the towns of the future when the towns of the present go.

A race will esteem and praise you in the days that are to be,

When I am silent and songless and the headstone crumbles on me!

Wonderful navvy shovel, the days are near at hand When you'll rise o'er sword and sceptre, a mighty power in the land.

PATRICK MACGILL

THE MAN WITH THE HOE

(Written after seeing Millet's painting of a brutalized toiler)

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
To feel the passion of Eternity?

power;

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?

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-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 questions 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?

(Copyright by Edwin Markham, 1899, 1924)

EDWIN MARKHAM

FACTORY LIFE

My little son, one day you 'll go
And live with poplars in a row
With limes and sycamores,
And you shall hear the throstle sing
When primroses come forth in spring
And boys live out of doors.

Here there are chimney-stacks for trees,
That sway when some untainted breeze
Comes whooping from the west;
Gaunt in the sun and moon they stand,

The landmark of a barren land
Where life has little zest.

Now put your cheek to mine, my dear;
You shall escape, lad, never fear,

To range the moors and wealds;
The time is coming, late or soon,

When you shall know how sweet is June
In unpolluted fields.

Indeed, my son, I cannot tell
Why we are prisoned in this hell

Whose grass is mostly black;

None knows what unseen masters make
Men linger where their hearts must ache
For lovely things they lack.

I too am keen to leave this grime
For some more spirit-stirring clime;
Perhaps this cannot be;

But you, at least your wings shall try,
And as I'm you and you are I,

You'll laugh and play for me.

ROLAND THIRLMERE

(From My Dog Blanco and Other Poems, published by Erskine Macdonald, London)

THE PIONEER

LONG years ago I blazed a trail

Through lovely woods unknown till then,
And marked with cairns of splintered shale
A mountain way for other men