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Keats' medievalism had a lifelong influence on Tennyson. From "The Lady of Shalott" (1832) to "The Idylls of the King" (1891) he viewed the modern world from a disenchanted remove, convinced that the living, like Gawain's ghost, were "blown along a wandering wind / And hollow, hollow, hollow, all delight." In "The Lotos-Eaters" (1833), he describes the ennui of moderns, haunted by "an ancient tale of wrong," condemned to "labour in the deep mid-ocean," and vexed with duties they can neither honor nor shun.
What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen towards the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease;
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.
If Tennyson saw labor as a curse for spiritual sloth, Gerard Manley Hopkins joined the Middle Ages in extolling its dignity. Apropos his inimitable claim, "sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine," from "The Windhover" (1877), which Hopkins thought his best poem, Alexander is brilliant:
"Sillion" is "furrow," archaic in English but familiar in French. It comes in the refrain of the first verse of La Marseillaise, the revolutionary anthem of the French Republic, which encourages citoyens so to defend themselves against their enemies "Qu'un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons"—"That an impure blood / Should slake our furrows." The Christian Hopkins associates the furrow made by the plough not with the blood of enemies but with daily sweat for daily bread: the lot of mankind since Adam. For medieval social thought, as seen in Piers Ploughman, this gave physical work a special value: hence the medieval maxim, laborare est orare—"to work is to pray." It also made the ploughman an archetype of man: the labourer whose labour provides the archetypal food for all. That is why, for Hopkins, the ploughman's hard work makes the earth turned over to shine in the eye of heaven.
The drudgery that Hopkins knew as an examiner in Greek at University College Dublin gave his respect for labor a hard-earned credibility. There was nothing sentimental or condescending about it. "557 papers on hand," he once remarked, "let those who have been thro' the like say what that means."
Alexander might have also pointed out how this Christian conception of labor was shared by Virgil. In his essay, "Virgil and the Christian World" (1951), T.S. Eliot explained that this was why Dante had made the poet of the Eclogues and the Georgics his guide to the ancient world. Unlike Homer, who regarded labor as infra dig, "Virgil perceived that agriculture is fundamental to civilization, and he affirmed the dignity of manual labour. When the Christian monastic orders came into being, the contemplative life and the life of manual labour were conjoined … . Christianity established the principle that action and contemplation, labour and prayer, are both essential to the life of the complete man." These truths must have particularly nagged at Hopkins as he made his way through the rookeries of Liverpool, Glasgow, and Dublin, where he witnessed firsthand how unemployment turned laboring men into animals: "This, by Despair, bred Hangdog, dull; by Rage, Manwolf, worse; and their packs infest the age."
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