Week 6 Analysis: Man With The Hoe

The Man With the Hoe is a great piece that signifies the time in which it was written. At this time city workers and farmers were at odds. City workers and industrial workers were all the rage and everyone was moving in to bigger cities to make more money. The Man with the Hoe is a call to all the people who were still farming and still out in the fields doing the hard work, and this call was to tell the people that they were the true backbone of society. The author clearly felt that people who were still doing the hard work of society were the true men and the biggest part of society, because they provide the supplies which are necessary for life. The poem asks "is this the handiwork you give to God, this monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?" this line says to me that those who build things that are not natural and do jobs in buildings and cities must show these to God at some point and in essence these things would be abominations to God. Meanwhile a life of farming and work in the natural sunlight doing processes that the earth allows for would be more pleasing to God because this is what God intended for us to do. The author closes the poem asking about the future of the people who think that what they do is good enough for the future, and for God."How will the Future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour? When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? " If humanity were to rebel and life were to revert back to primitive means, then those without skills and knowledge of the land would be doomed. In all I really enjoyed this poem and the way that the author speaks to his fellow workers. He clearly knows how important natural workers and farmers are too society, and during this point in the industrial revolution where workers were leaving farming behind to make more money in the big cities, poems like these that reminded people that farmers are the backbone of society were a necessity.