The Singing Man

He sang above the vineyards, and barren ground climbed into green beneath his hands. But the man who once stood sun-crowned over his harvest is now sought in the mills and mines, where the daylight pines.

In this book of poems, Josephine Preston Peabody sets the laboring man against a world of markets, mills, and mines. Her Singing Man works the land and dreams of bread earned by his own hands; instead, others take the harvest, and the songs that rose over the fields falter beneath the grinding wheels. As his hardship deepens, the poem asks what a society owes the people whose labor sustains it—and whether the lost man can be given back to the light. Who will answer the cry: “How long?”

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