Flowers For Socrates

Republished in honor of National Poetry Month

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

In pursuit of poetic history for National Poetry Month, I’ve dipped into the dusty past to look at a poet who was once an international figure in literary circles, but whose work has dwindled in the narrow eyes of Fame to a single poem, sometimes found in chronological anthologies: The Man With a Hoe.

The Man With a Hoe, in its day, actually furthered the Socialist Labor Movement. It caused much discussion among the reading public about the working poor, and a feeling among its readers that something ought to be done about their plight.

Today’s reader will find a lot of the other poetry that Edwin Markham (1852 – 1940) penned “old fashioned” at best. A revolution occurred in poetry, beginning in the early 20th Century, which Markham did not join. Some of his phrases are hackneyed,  the intrusion of ‘The Poet’ into the middle of his own poems is jarring, while other poems are clearly derivative. However, in some of his short poems, only a stanza or two, there are flashes of the poet who wrote a poem that has endured. 

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Poetry

She comes as hush and beauty of the night, 
            And sees too deep for laughter;
Her touch is a vibration and a light
            From worlds before and after.

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