Sunday, March 17, 2019

What is the meaning of second stanza in "The Man with the Hoe?"

"The Man with the Hoe" is a poem that questions the power differential in society and how those with power treat those without.
To understand the second stanza, one must start with the epigraph: 

God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him. (Genesis)

Following this biblical reference, the first stanza paints the image of a downtrodden farmworker. There is a striking contrast presented by these two ideas. The epigraph presents the idea that humans are made in the image of god, or that we are like god (or divine) ourselves. The second presents a very un-deified image of humanity: an overworked farmworker, dead in his tracks.
The second stanza confronts the reader with the discrepancy between the two. Consider the exasperated first line: "What gulfs between him and the seraphim!" Here, the author is pointing our attention to the distance between the dead farmer and the seraphim, or angels. The list of rhetorical questions that follows underscores the joyful aspects of life that the farmer is deprived of due to his socioeconomic status: music, the loveliness of the sunrise, the blossoming of flowers.
From there, the narrator steps back to compare the dead farmer to all of us: 

Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop....   

Basically, the narrator is suggesting that all of human suffering is bound up in this dead farmworker and that time will inevitably treat all of us the same way this farmer has been treated. It is, admittedly, a bleak outlook. But the author uses this image as a call to arms, to inspire those in power to create a better quality of life for the downtrodden. 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47948/the-man-with-the-hoe


The meaning of the second stanza of the poem is that the working person is being treated in an ungodly way--in a way that God never intended. While God created people to rule over the land and seas, to search the heavens, and to contemplate eternity, the working person lives in a way that is degraded and different from God's design for him or her. While God's dream was to create people as exalted beings, people live in a way that is worse than how creatures in hell live. The state of the working person is a living critique of the world's greed and of omens of bad things to come. In essence, the way working people, such as farmers, are treated in is direct contradiction to God's design for them. 

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