Week 4 Blog Post- Caitlin
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Stephen Duck, the 18th century day laborer and poet gave people outside the laboring class an insider’s look into the world of agricultural workers in his time. His poem “The Thresher’s Labor” primarily focuses on the repetition of backbreaking, hard, and repetitive work that is necessary to grow food. Modern employees or “associates” as many corporations choose to call their underlings could learn a few things from Duck. He tells the story of a lowly day laborer, a story that many employees would find eerily and perhaps uncomfortably familiar. Duck’s story mirrors that of many modern day workers that feel trapped in the cycle of their work 5 days a week 9am-5pm. Same thing day in and day out, he sums up this feeling at the end of his poem lines 280-283 “Now growing Labours still succeed the past, and growing always new, must always last”.
Duck’s account of labor differs from most modern positions that there is no hope for promotion or pay raise for him, he works for a wage and that is pretty much all he will ever earn. Thankfully here in the 21st century most jobs have an opportunity to move up or gain more, but when looking at the similarities between working then and working now, is looking forward to raises and promotions employees really just trying to make themselves feel better about their jobs? Even Duck did this by comparing himself to a wide variety of heroic and godly characters from Greek and Roman mythology. Lines 40-41 “Down one, one up, so well they keep the Time, The Cyclops Hammers could not truer chime;”
Duck was born into his working class situation and though modern day Americans are generally encouraged to work hard, get good jobs and move up, many people don’t move anywhere and feel trapped. I think that “The Thresher’s Labor” would be good reading for a lot of employees to get them thinking about what they are spending their lives, time, energy and effort on. Whether it is worth it and how valuable they think their time is.
You’ve opened up a lot of great questions, Caitlin, in thinking about how Duck’s situation mirrors that of other 20th century workers, and what they might get from the experience of reading his poetry. There are some very open-ended questions that you could ask: *has* anything changed between the 18th century and now, in terms of worker’s situations? If things haven’t changed, then why haven’t they? And given that we’ve made lots of advancements that often fall under the label of “progress,” what does progress mean, and who is it progress for? But to ask a more concrete question, let’s imagine that Duck owned his own farm, rather than being someone else’s employee. How might that make his concerns different?