Sound & Sense: An Open Thread
On fame — and an open mic for whatever’s on your mind
Fame is a fickle food
by Emily Dickinson
Fame is a fickle food Upon a shifting plate Whose table once a Guest but not The second time is set. Whose crumbs the crows inspect And with ironic caw Flap past it to the Farmer’s Corn — Men eat of it and die. ═════════════════════════
In his 1637 poem “Lycidas,” John Milton takes a curious view of fame. The drive for recognition and praise is good, in that “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise . . . / To scorn delights and live laborious days.” The seeking of fame has a nobility about it, in other words, but it is at last an infirmity — in fact, the “last infirmity of noble mind.” Proper fame, the real praise that we should seek, is not a reward from the world, “nor in broad rumour lies.” Instead it “lives and spreads aloft” by the “perfect witness of all-judging Jove.” God’s “pure eyes” are the source of true fame, which will not be cut off by death, “th’abhorred shears” of the “blind Fury.”
In “Fame is a fickle food,” Emily Dickinson puts a simpler thought — a disdain for the entire thing: “Men eat of it and die.” Numbered 1702 in her collected poems, this is a curious late poem preserved in Susan Dickinson’s handwriting — unfinished, perhaps: a note for a poem, or trimeter interrupted with a pair of dimeter lines.
But as to the thought itself, what are we to say? Emily Dickinson was aware of how good a poet she was, I suspect, but she did not find fame young and essentially gave up on finding it in later life.
There’s more than just sour grapes in “Fame is a fickle food,” however. This is, in some ways, as puritanical a thought — in the strict sense of the word, expressing the sensibility of the Pilgrims — as she ever had. The poem insists that human praise is not only insufficient and unfulfilling, the source a laughing sneer for crows. It’s also actively dangerous and to be shunned.
Those of us with neither fame nor the work that deserves it: Is this a consolation?
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This grad student is very grateful for your serious work in selecting poems and providing commentary. If I had more of an income and food prices weren’t so high, I would gladly become a paid subscriber and hope to soon after graduation!
Whether from fame or infamy, men die who partake of it, but then, so do crows that go off to eat the farmer's corn. Since death is a common malady, why not seek some great work, that whether one finishes it or not, a memento of a time or place will remain, if not its creator.