Hanford Lennox Gordon’s The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems opens with a canoe race on a “reed-bordered, beautiful river,” where six oars of the Dakota Tamdóka outpace ten of DuLuth’s French voyageurs. The passage is thick with physical detail—swollen veins, sweat on brawny breasts, a blue heron flushed from reeds—and a competitive rhythm that mirrors the straining oarsmen. Gordon, a lawyer turned poet on the Minnesota frontier, frames the poem in his preface as a personal remedy: “I wrote Pauline after I had been given up to die by my physicians.” This collection, then, is both a record of Indigenous life and a document of the author’s own survival.

Race and Rivalry on the River

The excerpt from “The Feast of the Virgins” centers on a tense contest between two crews: DuLuth’s voyageurs and Tamdóka’s Dakotas. Gordon counts oars—ten against six—and notes the unequal “burden of men” versus “voyageurs’ luggage,” making the race a test of skill and weight. The language is kinetic: “side by side, neck and neck, through the meadows” repeats like a pulse, while the victor’s whoop echoes across “neighboring forests profound.” Yet the race is only a prelude. That night, in camp, the mood shifts. The voyageurs’ jests are “few and uncouth”; the braves sit “moody and silent.” Gordon builds suspense through sensory contrast: the low whisper of leaves, the long howl of a wolf, the shrill hoot of an owl that makes the Frenchmen scowl. The Dakotas, we are told, have “plotted red murder by night,” but the French are “wary and armed to the teeth.” The scene ends with both sides feigning sleep, guns at the ready, under a moon that “walks softly” over the marshes.

The Poet’s Own Medicine

Gordon’s preface is unusually personal. He describes his life as “active and busy,” his poetry written “at odd hours” for rest and relief from “physical suffering.” Broken by overwork, he abandoned law and wrote Pauline after being “given up to die.” The poem, he claims, “proved to be a better ‘medicine’ for me than all the quackeries of the quacks.” This framing invites the reader to see the entire volume as a kind of survival work. Gordon acknowledges that some poems will be condemned by critics, but he calls them his “chicks” and gathers them under his wings, quoting Cowper on an author’s fondness for his creations. The preface also notes his long residence on the Northwest frontier and personal acquaintance with Dakota chiefs and braves—a claim that lends ethnographic weight to the narrative poems, though the excerpts show a romanticized, adversarial portrayal of Indigenous figures.

Landscape as Stage and Witness

Gordon’s descriptions of the Minnesota River valley are precise and atmospheric. The river is “a necklet of sapphires” asleep in the lap of the plain; the camp lies in “a tall, somber forest” where firelight “darkle[s] and gleam[s]” on pine trunks. He populates the night with specific sounds—the “long-winding howl of the lone wolf,” the “shrill” hoot of the owl—and with the “lights of the Fen-Spirits” that flare and dance on low marshes. These details do more than set a scene; they create a world that is watchful and alive. The moon is personified as a cautious walker, asked to tread softly because “the earth lies asleep.” The landscape is not passive backdrop but participant: the forest “hushed,” the winds “asleep in the caves,” the mists “gather[ing] and hover[ing].” This attention to natural phenomena gives the narrative a mythic undertone, as if the events are being observed by forces older than the human actors.

Readers approaching this collection should note that the title poem is only one of many—the table of contents lists over fifty works, ranging from war poems like “Gettysburg: Charge of the First Minnesota” to comic pieces like “Pat and the Pig.” Gordon’s voice shifts between epic narration, personal lyric, and occasional satire. The excerpts suggest a poet deeply engaged with the physical and cultural landscape of the Upper Midwest, but also one who writes from a settler perspective, with all the tensions that implies. Treat the Dakota characters as figures in a dramatic poem, not as historical reportage.