· Analyze painting and poem (below) in a 1 and ½ page essay answer some of the questions below along with some of the literary elements below.

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· The Man with the Hoe

Edwin Markham 1852 –1940

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· 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?

·

Describe the painting briefly. For example, “There are four apples in this painting: two yellow, one red, one green. There’s one apple peel on the floor. The apples are in a wooden bowl. A knife also lies on the table. The scene is indoors. There’s a window on the left side of the canvas…” Pretend you’re Joe Friday and the canvas is a crime scene. Get the facts down.

Does the painting have thick, curved, straight, vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines?

Is the canvas sparse or ornate? Is it very detailed and self-explanatory, or does it lack detail and require an active viewer to make sense of it?

What assumes primary attention? What is lit up? What is in shadow?

What is in the foreground, middleground, background?

What is the painting’s texture (sharp, prickly, clotted, soft, slick, sticky, rippled, etc.)?

Are shapes organic or geometric? What colors predominate? What repetitions occur?

Is the perspective human or divine (or something else)?

Are you looking in voyeuristically, or are the people in the painting aware of your presence?

Is one side of the painting heavier than the other?

Is movement portrayed? Are images halting, rising or falling, coming or going?

Are people connected or alienated (looking away from each other)?

What are facial expressions and, in particular, eyes, saying?

What clothes and gestures are portrayed? How old are the people?

What are the densities in the painting (places where things gather up, as in a bowl of fruit, or the fabric of a dress, or a clustering of poor people about a fire)?

Where are things crowded in the painting, pressing upon one another, building up a force or weight?

What are the scarcities and abundances (e.g., a dog with its ribs showing, or a woman with thick hair or an ample bosom carrying a sloshing milk bucket).

What might have a symbolic meaning in the painting?

Where are tensions in the painting? Where are blessings portrayed in a world with scarce resources?

Is the heroic celebrated or deconstructed? Is the sacred celebrated or deconstructed?

Is irony present?

Is there a struggle between order (Apollo) and chaos (Dionysus)? Are threatening energies hovering?

What themes are present (disease, wealth, war, aging, death, love, cruelty)?

Buddhist monks, on greeting each other, say, “Namaste,” which means, “I greet the divinity within you.” Where do you see “divinity” beaming off this painting (e.g., a breathtaking mountain, a chair that jumps off the canvas, the fiery eyes of a homeless woman looking at you)?

Do the human characters in the painting appear to be misunderstanding, misleading, or hindering one another? Or are they in harmony (e.g., dancing)?

Put yourself in the painting. Become each character in turn. What are the characters experiencing through their five senses? What might each be thinking?

What are the hidden darknesses in this painting? Where are the secrets?

Is there an intergenerational object in the painting, that is, something indifferent to the dramas and comings and goings of men and women (e.g., a lighthouse, a cathedral, an ancient oak, a Roman ruin, a mountain, the sky)?

Are there symbols of nature’s indifference to human life? Do they symbolize the futility of being? Do they mock God? Or are they symbols of God mocking us?

Where are the Mandelbrot sets (recurrent patterns, implicitly mathematical, either in brush strokes, wallpaper, or clothing patterns)?

Is the sublime present in this painting (the power of nature contrasted with human assertion)?

Sophocles says that, “Nothing very great comes into the life of mortals without disaster.” Does this painting convey hope about the human condition, or a sense of foreboding?

Is there anything about the life of the artist, or his or her time period, that sheds light on the painting?

How does the title affect your interpretation of the painting?

What can be compared and contrasted within the painting?

What would happen to the painting if, for example, the chair was made from steel and not wood, or if the snake held to Cleopatra’s breast was thicker than the one portrayed, etc.?

What are the sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells conveyed in the painting?

Is there a story that this painting explicitly tells? If not, if you were telling a story about this painting, what would it be?

· Are there connecting shocks in the painting (things that don’t seem to belong together)? What is defamiliarized (defamiliarization = the presentation of an ordinary object in an unusual way that makes us take notice of it)?

· In one sentence, what is this painting, from your perspective, about?

ELEMENTS OF POETRY

· Sounds (rhyme [perfect, eye, slant], alliteration, assonance, consonance)

· Scansion (e.g., variations on rhythm)

· Line endings (end-stopped or enjambed)

· Diction (heightened or naturalistic) and tone (serious, humorous, playful, sarcastic, romantic, ironic, desperate, etc.)

· Imagery (visual or appealing to other senses)

· Figures of speech (pun, metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, antithesis, symbol, anaphora, etc.)

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