Explore "If a Man May Not Eat Neither Can He Work" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How can he work? He never has been taught / The free use of what faculties he had. / Why should he work? Who ever yet has thought / To give a love of working to the lad.
How can he work? His life has felt the lack / Of all that makes us work; the proud, the free, / Each saying to the world, "I give you back / Part of the glory you have given me!"
Why should he work? He has no honor high, / Born of great trust and wealth and sense of power; / Honor, that makes us yearn before we die / To add our labor to the world's rich dower.
How can he work? He has no inner strength / Urging him on to action, no desire / To strain and wrestle, to achieve at length, / Burning in all his veins,-a hidden fire.
Why should he work? There is no debt behind / That man's nobility most longs to pay; / No claim upon him,-only the one blind / Brute instinct that his dinner lies that way.
And that is not enough. Who may not eat / Freely at life's full table all his youth, / Can never work in power and joy complete, / In fulness, and in honor, and in truth.