Life moves fast in the Golden State—blink an eye and California has changed forever. Though we can't alter that blistering pace, we can still—every so often—grab a little breather by visiting the past.
Edwin Markham's third book of poems, 1919's The Shoes of Happiness, collected a number of nostalgic pieces, like "The Heart's Return," which evokes the joy of an idyllic California boyhood in order to banish the melancholy of a disappointed adulthood.
When darkened hours come crowding fast,
A thought—and all the dark is past!
For I am back a boy again,
Knee-deep in heading barley in a Mendocino glen.
I cannot ever be so sad
But one thing still will make me glad–
That hid spring in the Suisun hills:
My heart keeps going back to it thru all the earthly ills.
How often when the brood of care
Would hold me in a hopeless snare,
My soul springs winged and away,
Remembering that wild duck's nest above Benicia bay!
Or when night finds me toiling still,
I am back again on the greening hill,
A shepherd boy at set of sun,
Folding his happy sheep and knowing all his tasks are done.
For modern readers, some of Edwin Markham's poems might sound overly sentimental. But for a time, the author of works like "The Man with the Hoe" and "Lincoln" was one of America's best-known poets, as famous for performing his verse as he was for writing it.
"L'homme à la houe (The Man with the Hoe), painted by Jean-François Millet, 1860-62. Larger.
California's reputation as a land of opportunity rings true for many of us, but for others, dreams of "The Golden State" remain as elusive as the seven treasure cities of El Dorado.
Edwin Markham's famous poem "The Man with the Hoe" depicts one such outsider, borrowing the image of a beleaguered field laborer from Jean-Françis Millet's 1863 painting of the same name.
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?
"The Man with the Hoe," published in 1899, earned Markham a quarter million dollars and—paradoxically—the title of "the bard of labor."
below to hear radio segment.
.jpg){kind=link}