What is meant by the quotation "what to him / Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?" in "The Man with a Hoe" by Edwin Markham?

In this complex stanza, points are being made in reference to a Biblical allusion to Psalm 8:5: "You have made [humans] a little lower than the Angels and crowned [humans] with glory and honor" (Psalm 8:5). To describe laborers—as seen by him in the oil painting "L'homme à la houe" (1863) by Jean-François Millet—Edwin Markham enlarges the Biblical concept of "a little lower," making it a great "gulf" of separation between the laborer and the angels (seraphim). He assigns "Time's tragedy" to the laborer's "aching stoop." Dramatizing his point for the learned (non-laborers) who are reading his poem, he suggests that such stooped, lowly, "profaned and disinherited" laborers have no strength to consider the problems Plato poses or the theories he presents; they have no opportunity to unbend and turn their eyes skyward to contemplate the meaning of the movement of the starry Pleiades.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of the Pleiades?

Markham goes on to suggest in the lines following "Pleiades" that the "dread shape" of the laborer, through whom "the suffering ages look," does not have the time, strength, or ability to contemplate the mundane, earthly pleasures of the "peaks of song, / The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose." Markham makes the point that grueling labor reduces humans to being far lower than their God-given state, reduces them to a state that is deadened to higher thought and contemplation, to a state that is as stooped as their physical state:

Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited.

The larger point that these lines are part of, "what to him / Are Plato and the swing of the Pleiades?" is that "this dread shape humanity betrayed"—plundered of rightful thought, profaned of rightful place, disinherited of the the wonders of life—cries out in protest to the "Powers" that created life. His cries, which are silenced along with his contemplation of Plato and his wonder at how the summer and winter "swing" of the rising and setting of the Pleiades cluster, are a prophecy of retribution for those humans who lower other humans in this way: "Cries protest to the Powers that made the world, / A protest that is also prophecy."

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

nouns - what do you call the person who passes the trophies to the prize giver/presenter?

The person who gives out the trophies to the winners are called award presenters. So what do u call the person who passes the trophies to the presenter? Thanks!

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.

Notes

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