Duck's Thresher Speaks Volumes of the Working Class

Stephen Duck's Poems on Several Subjects (1730) are interesting, because he was a common labourer and a self-educated man in the fields of poetry, reading, and writing. His poem "The Thresher's Labourer" is unique in its portrait of life for the working class, because it presents a mundane cycle of labour, hardship, and repetition.

From the outset of the poem, there is a circular nature of the speaker (the titular Thresher) and his colleagues (hint hint-cycle) in their daily laborers. They must rise early, leave the barns in which they reside, work in the fields under the sun, return to their lodgings, and wait to repeat the process on the following morning. The Master calls them to prepare for the coming harvest, and he intends to rouse them from their slumber each day (except for the Day of the Sabbath). At one point, the speaker compares the situation with Hercules' Twelve Labours by noting that the tasks of the peasants are long, tiresome, and never-ending.

Despite eventually gaining success and pleasing the master, the labourers are told by their employer (or the "Cheat") that they must repeat their toils to ensure the next harvest of corn, which will not be for another year. Duck inserts a small Greek reference to the myth of Sisyphus, which indicates that the work of the labourers is a never-ending cycle that will continue to take place. This is made evident with the speaker noting "Now growing Labours still succeed the past,/And growing always new, must always last." Although the workers will not last forever, the labours of threshing will go on.

For a working class man, Stephen Duck was quite articulate and vivid in depicting the struggles of the common labourer. Considering his mental health problems and eventual suicide, it is evident that he endured a great deal of suffering and hardship in his life. "The Thresher's Labour" is a significant poem in the presentation of commoners in the 18th Century.