What are the best poems about work?

February 20, 2020 6:25 AM

I'm making a film about a guy who works with his hands in an antiquated profession and want him to read a poem. Any fitting works come to mind? No specific time period required. Thanks.
posted by captainscared to Media & Arts (21 answers total)

To be of use, Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

posted by zamboni at 6:30 AM on February 20, 2020 [14 favorites]

"By God, the old man could handle a spade."
posted by johngoren at 6:33 AM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Here are a few from the Poetry Foundation.

The Phillip Levine one, "What Work Is" came to mind, since I saw him read it once; but, I don't understand it.
posted by thelonius at 6:33 AM on February 20, 2020

Working with his hands in an antiquated profession makes me think about The Village Blacksmith by Longfellow.
posted by needs more cowbell at 6:34 AM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Philip Larkin's "Toads" is not a cheery one. Here are the first 2 stanzas:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.
posted by zadcat at 6:52 AM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Seconding Heaney's Digging. Also, here's Tracy K. Smith, The Good Life:

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.
 
posted by miles per flower at 6:57 AM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

A Psalm of Life
posted by Ideefixe at 7:13 AM on February 20, 2020

Robert Frost's Two Tramps in Mud Time
posted by pinwheel spark at 7:36 AM on February 20, 2020

The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay. Not about work per se, but definitely a reflection on the making (and breaking) of things.
posted by SPrintF at 7:48 AM on February 20, 2020

Also consider McAndrew's Hymn (the reason why all engineers are Scots).
posted by SPrintF at 7:54 AM on February 20, 2020

Atlas by U.A. Fanthorpe came to mind for me, although most of the physical work is in the last stanza. Beautiful love poem.
posted by possibilityleft at 7:57 AM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

If your character is sick of working, perhaps Tom Wayman’s “Routines”:

After a while the body doesn't want to work.
When the alarm clock rings in the morning
the body refuses to get up. "You go to work if you're so
keen,"
it says. "Me, I'm going back to sleep."
I have to nudge it in the ribs to get it out of bed.
If I had my way I'd just leave you here, I tell it
as it stands blinking. But I need you to carry your end of
the load....

etc.

posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 8:19 AM on February 20, 2020

" All may of Thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture—"for Thy sake"—
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th' action fine."

(George Herbert)
posted by praemunire at 9:49 AM on February 20, 2020

The best poem about work is obviously:

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime
That’s why I shit on company time
posted by rodlymight at 9:57 AM on February 20, 2020

For Those Whose Work is Invisible, Mary Gordon

"For Those Whose Work Is Invisible: For those who paint the undersides of boats, Makers of ornamental drains on roofs - too high to be seen, Cobblers who labor over inner soles, Seamstresses who stitch the wrong sides of linings, For scholars whose research leads to no obvious discovery, For dentists who polish each gold surface of the fillings of upper molars, For civil engineers and those who repair water mains, For electricians, for artists who suppress what does injustice to their visions, For surgeons whose sutures are things of beauty. For all those whose work is for Your eye only, Who labor for Your entertainment or their own, Who sleep in peace or do not sleep in peace, knowing their efforts are unknown. Protect them from downheartedness - and from diseases of the eye. Grant them perseverance, for the sake of Your love, which is humble, invisible and heedless of reward."
posted by wellifyouinsist at 12:40 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

The Nightfishing by WS Graham is an amazing, long poem about working through the night on a fishing boat. (It's about plenty of other things too, of course.)
posted by lapsangsouchong at 2:11 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I love Marge Piercy's poem above, but the kind of manual labor it imagines is very far outside the gruel of capitalism...

"Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)" by Edward Hirsch

A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.

She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposition:

The irreducible slavery of workers. "To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work."

She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,

In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples

Ten hours per day. She doesn't eat.
She doesn't sleep. Shealmost doesn't think

Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now

That the furnace has labelled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave's.

Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled

Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbinsfrom the flames.

Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and afflicted

Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.

Proposition: "Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.

Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed."

We have to wake in order to work, to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submit

To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabit the repetitions,

To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.

She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to eat . . .

Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens.

Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.

Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.

:: Edward Hirsch, Earthly Measures (Knopf, 1994)
posted by nantucket at 4:30 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ox Cart Man
BY DONALD HALL
In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar’s portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart’s floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hooped by hand at the forge’s fire.

He walks by his ox’s head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire’s light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year’s ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again.
posted by epj at 9:51 PM on February 20, 2020

I know some people roll their eyes at Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet now, but it does include what I think is a meaningful chapter On Work.
posted by fuse theorem at 12:07 PM on February 21, 2020

Edwin Markham wrote my dad's favorite poem ever, The Man With the Hoe. Not very cheery, but very much about physical labor.

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.

It was inspired by this painting by Jean-François Millet.
posted by current resident at 5:22 PM on February 21, 2020

Telephone Repairman, Joseph Millar
Ox Cart Man, Donald Hall
posted by kristi at 12:59 PM on February 25, 2020