ABSTRACT
Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour” is conventionally characterized as an autobiographical poem, of documentary significance in its portrayal of work and of the socio-economic system that exerts oppressive power over the laboring poor. Uniquely authorized to write about his subject, Duck, the “Thresher Poet,” expounds particularly upon the body’s relationship to the environment that he inhabits, detailing the debilitating fatigue of manual labor and the intricate system that exacts it. In seizing the authority of the laborer to write upon labor, Duck interrogates several major premises of the georgic mode, in the process revealing concerns about agency and materiality that link him to Cowper as well as to Goldsmith in his exploration of the failure of imagination and art to ameliorate a situation that is so unequivocally material and socio-political. Duck’s concerns about authority, in fact, are deeply rooted, extending to a reluctance fully to own his right to speak, a reluctance betrayed by a periodic reversion to a conventional poetic idiom that is far different from his native voice.
