ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

In the poem The Thresher’s Labour Duck really emphasizes labor. This is a poem written about the hardships of the working class, particularly threshers doing farm labor. The poem opens with the harvesting of the crops, passes through the seasons, and ends again with the harvesting of the crops. This emphasizes the apparent endlessness of threshing. Duck lists the various difficulties of his work, such as the heat of the sun, the never-ending hours, and the annoyance of woman workers. His labor experience is shown through hierarchy, hardworking,  always working; Stephen Duck does a lot of jobs  in the poem. The labor in his poem is the type of labor we have today 8 hour shifts the same routine everyday. If Duck and Collier would meet he would probably rub it in her face that women are not hard workers like men. In the two poems are very sexist against each other. What Mary Collier is known for is her poem in response to Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour. She took offense to his statements against women, and wrote a poem entitled The Woman’s Labour, defending women labourers by listing all that they do, often referencing portions of Duck’s poem as arguments against him. Collier wrote The Woman’s Labour in hopes of becoming more than a working-class woman, like Stephen Duck did. Duck portrays women to be useless in the labour aspect. But Collier well sets her argument that women are as hard working as men. Men at least will stop working when they retire they will be good for nothing but for the woman will still be working until the say she dies.