National Poetry Month--Two By Edwin Markham
From the publication of his poem The Man With the Hoe inspired by a painting by Jean-François Millet in 1898 through the early decades of the 20th Century, Markham was one of the most widely read and admired of American poets. Although more than a generation older, he was often classed with Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsey as one of the poets of the people. But due to shifting styles and tastes he is today an obscure figure.
Charles Edwin Markam was born the youngest of 10 children to a farm family near Oregon City, Oregon in 1853. His father abandoned the family and his devoutly Christian mother divorced him when Markam was young. His mother and her younger children relocated to a small ranch in Lagoon Valley, California northwest of San Francisco. The boy was sporadically educated at rural schools. He was a gifted and eager student, but his mother vehemently opposed his attempts to get an education both because she feared that “book learning” would lead her son into sin and because she needed him for support. At the age of 12 his schooling ended and he worked on the family ranch or hired out as a laborer. It was a hard life which left Markam a champion of the exploited and a skeptic of harsh orthodox Christianity.
Despite his mother’s opposition Markam enrolled in a hard scrabble little college in at Vacaville, California. He was soon eking out a living as a small town school master. He earned enough money to enroll in a more established school, Christian College in Santa Rosa, California from which he graduated in 1873. While there, he discovered Universalism, a denomination where the good news of universal salvation echoed his own emerging outlook. Upon graduation he was able to secure a better position as a public school teacher in El Dorado County. He was so well thought of that he was elected Superintendent of Schools six years later.
In 1890 he moved to the big city of Oakland where he became a high school principle. In his new community, he soon fell in with a semi-bohemian circle of writers and poets that included Joaquin Miller, Donna Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Edmund Clarence Stedman, all important regionalist writers who encouraged his literary efforts.
He had two failed marriages when he married Anna Catherine Murphy in 1895, a union that endured until her death in 1938. The same year he abandoned the use of his first name, by which he had been known his entire life, and began using middle name, Edwin. Three years later he burst into public awareness with his famous poem, The Man With the Hoe.
Markham soon found himself in demand on the lecture platform both for reading his poetry and expounding on his socialist and Universalist beliefs. His talks were often sponsored by labor unions and labor mutual aid organizations.
By the turn of the Century Markham was ready to give up his career as a teacher for the life of a full time literary man. He relocated his family first to Brooklyn, New York and then to the Staten Island home where he built an extensive personal library and lived until his death. His first two books The Man With The Hoe and Other Poems in 1899 and Lincoln and Other Poems in 1901 were hugely popular, selling to workers as well as to the usual audience for poetry, a small educated elite.
The second book contained Lincoln, the Man of the People later lauded by critic Henry Van Dyke of Princeton as “the greatest poem ever written on the immortal martyr, and the greatest that ever will be written”-steep praise indeed considering that the competition included two of Walt Whitman’s most famous poems as well as works by Edgar Lee Master, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsey. In 1922 Markham was selected to read the poem, which he revised for the occasion, at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial.
Markham produced several more volumes of poetry, although none were as successful as the first two. The rise of the Imagists and Modernists eclipsed his reputation in academia. The fact that his work remained popular with the masses may have hastened the shipwreck of his literary reputation. By the time he died at the age of 87 in 1940, he had virtually vanished from the cannon of American poetry.
During his ling life Markam wrote on many themes and in different styles. There were simple maxim-like brief poems like Outwitted which advanced his values of Universalism, democracy, and equality. There were pastoral and nature poems mostly drawn from his California days. There were didactic poems like those he wrote to aid the campaign against child labor. But Markham also gloried in drawing on the classics, which he had studied at Santa Rosa. Seldom reprinted now, I find these among the most charming of his work. Here are two of my favorites.
Look Into the Gulf
I LOOKED one night, and there the Semiramis,
With all her mourning doves about her head,
Sat rocking on an ancient road of Hell,
Withered and eyeless, chanting to the moon
Snatches of song they sang to her of old
Upon the lighted roofs of Nineveh.
And then her voice rang out with rattling laugh:
"The bugles! they are crying back again--
Bugles that broke the nights of Babylon,
And then went crying on through Nineveh.
....................
Stand back, ye trembling messengers of ill!
Women, let go my hair: I am the Queen,
A whirlwind and a blaze of swords to quell
Insurgent cities. Let the iron tread
Of armies shake the earth. Look, lofty towers:
Assyria goes by upon the wind!"
And so she babbles by the ancient road,
While cities turned to dust upon the Earth
Rise through her whirling brain to live again--
Babbles all night, and when her voice is dead
Her weary lips beat on without a sound.
Lion and Lioness
ONE night we were together, you and I,
And had unsown Assyria for a lair,
Before the walls of Babylon rose in air.
How languid hills were heaped along the sky,
And white bones marked the wells of alkali,
When suddenly down the lion-path a sound . . .
The wild man-odor . . . then a crouch, a bound,
And the frail Thing fell quivering with a cry!
Your yellow eyes burned beautiful with light:
The dead man lying there quieted and white:
I roared my triumph over the desert wide,
Then stretched out, glad for the sands and satisfied;
And through the long, star-stilled Assyrian night,
I felt your body breathing by my side.