Gordon on Fame, That Coy Goddess

Hanford Lennox Gordon · Down to Earth Series · 7 pages

A short anthology rather than an essay, built around the preface to Hanford Lennox Gordon's Indian Legends and Other Poems. Fame is described there as a coy goddess who rarely bestows her favours on the man who seeks her — a phantom many pursue and few overtake, delighting to hover for a time like a ghost over the graves of dead men who neither know nor care, and remaining to the living a veritable will-o'-the-wisp. The qualification Gordon attaches is what saves the piece from mere cynicism: that every man nonetheless owes something to his fellow men.

Four poets are then set around that judgement, each supplying a line. Pope, that he neither slights Fame nor calls for her favours, since she comes unlooked-for if she comes at all. Milton, from Lycidas, that fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil. Byron, from the monody on Sheridan, that folly loves the martyrdom of fame. And Pope again, from his Iliad, that the rest were vulgar deaths, unknown to fame. The later pages develop the theme that the vanities and emptiness of fame and wealth will soon stand bare — which places this file with A rich life, without the trappings of Mammon earlier in the same batch.

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