WARRIOR OF GOD

 

Warrior of God, man’s friend, and tyrant’s foe,
Now somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan,
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know
This earth has never borne a nobler man.

—Lord Tennyson's "Epitaph on General Gordon, 

published in the London Times on this day in 1885, three months after Gordon’s death at the siege of Khartoum.

Gordon was a national hero, and Tennyson was Poet Laureate, but the epitaph was not an obligatory or dispassionate exercise.

For Tennyson, Gordon was exemplary not as an agent of Empire but as a charity worker,

a man so devoted to helping destitute street kids that the Gordon Boys’ National Memorial Home was established at his death, paid for by public subscription.

When the funding for the Gordon Boys’ Home appeared to be sagging, Tennyson prodded the public conscience with “Have We Forgotten Gordon?” published in Punch magazine in 1891.

Tennyson was eighty-two at the time, and he would die the next year,

but he was still “the Singer of Haslemere,” (the Surrey town where he lived) and impassioned:

Are we sleeping? "Have we forgotten?" Like the thrust of an Arab spear
Comes that conscience-piercing-question from the Singer of Haslemere.
Have we indeed forgotten the hero we so be-sang,
When across the far south sand-wastes the news of his murder rang?...

 

 

What heroes do you think we as a nation have forgotten? 

 

Or have we forgotten not just people

but principles thought no longer

important?