A Quote My Cuter & Shorter Half Found

My Cuter and Shorter Half reads a lot of Trans-Mississippi West history, biographies, narratives, etc. She was reading one book when she found a quote she thought I might like, so she wrote it down. I do like it, because it expresses a truth that I keep hammering away on, on this blog, on my Facebook page and on fora in which I participate.

She had no idea who wrote it, but since she had written it out in full, I was able to track it down by typing the entire quote into the search bar on Google Chrome. Then having found the book, 'Historic Towns of the Western States', I used the 'find' function to track down the exact quote. I found that it was in the chapter on San Francisco, written by Edwin Markham.

Markham's name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't make a connection as to why, so I searched Wikipedia for him. I learned that he was the poet who had written The Man With The Hoe (Written After Seeing Millet's World-Famous Painting), which I had read many years ago as a schoolboy.

Here is the painting that inspired him, by Jean-François Millet, one of my favourite painters. I think the reason I like his work is that he was a rural peasant, who painted scenes of rural life in the Realist School.

L'homme à la houe, Millet

And here is the poem that was inspired by the painting:

The Man With The Hoe (Written After Seeing Millet's World-Famous Painting)

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 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-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 the world? 
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings -- 
With those who shaped him to the thing he is -- 
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God, 
After the silence of the centuries? 

And here is the quote which my C&SH found. I am not at all surprised at the poetic quality, now that I know by whom it was written.

"Men never learn, save through suffering, that the support of the common welfare is a sacred duty, and that this duty squares exactly their highest private interests."

Edwin Markham, Chapter on San Francisco, HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE WESTERN STATES. Edited by LYMAN P. POWELL, G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK & LONDON, The Knickerbocker Press, 1901, p. 594

The entire book at Project Gutenberg

Historic Towns

And the Wikipedia article on the poet

Edwin Markham