Life & Wisdom Quote by William Davenant

Fame, Davenant suggests, behaves less like a crown than a current: the closer you stand to its source, the thinner it looks. The line works because it refuses the flattering fantasy that recognition begins at home and radiates outward. Instead, it flips the map. A river is “bred” in cramped places - springs, gullies, private terrain - and only gains width once it has traveled, absorbed tributaries, and been seen by more eyes than the village that first ignored it. It’s a metaphor that smuggles in a social critique: proximity breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds stinginess. Your neighbors don’t see your aura; they see your habits, your debts, your old embarrassments.

Davenant was a working poet in a volatile 17th-century England where patronage, court favor, and political allegiance shaped careers as much as talent. In that ecosystem, reputation wasn’t a pure reward for craft; it was a commodity traded across distance. The court could fetishize “the poet” as a type precisely because it didn’t have to live with the person. “Afar off” is where myth-making happens: the farther the audience, the easier it is to compress a complicated life into a legible legend.

There’s also a quiet self-defense in the image. If your immediate circle withholds applause, don’t mistake that for failure; the river isn’t meant to be wide at the spring. Davenant’s wit is in making consolation sound like geography: the slight you feel locally is framed as a natural law, not a personal verdict.