Forgotten Ground Regained

ISSN 2996-6353
New Series Issue 7, Summer, 2025
INTRODUCTION
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Ring
Those of us who grew up with the Lord of the Rings no doubt remember this quote, which was highlighted not only in the original Trilogy, but in the Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation. The quote reminds me, as it has no doubt reminded many others, of the so-called Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”. But apparently there is no such curse. That expression seems to derive, indirectly, from an 1898 speech by Joseph Chamberlain, referring to political conflict in England home rule for Ireland, in which he said:
  • I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety.
Joseph Chamberlain thought he was living in interesting times in 1898. Hitler’s Germany would teach his son, Austen Chamberlain, who went to Munich hoping for a nice, boring diplomatic agreement, just what interesting times were. He got what W.H. Auden called, “The Age of Anxiety”, in his long alliterative poem of the same name.
This is a lesson people keep needing to learn. The hope and optimism of the early 1960s in America ended in turmoil and change that led Alvin Toffler and his wife Adelaide Farrell to coin the term “future shock” (also the title of their book), which they defined as:
  • … the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.
And similarly, after the optimism induced by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world suffered another series of shocks, including the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and a series of wars -- in the Persian Gulf and Iraq, in the Former Yugoslavia and Ukraine, in Gaza, and Iran, accompanied by political turmoil in nation after nation. The current upheavals in the United States are simply the latest symptom. Even Francis Fukuyama, widely considered an unfounded optimist for the views expressed in his book, The End of History and The Last Man, warned of reefs lying ahead:
  • The decline of community life suggests that in the future, we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts. But the opposite danger exists as well, namely, that we will return to being first men engaged in bloody and pointless prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons. Indeed, the two problems are related to one another, for the absence of regular and constructive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later resurgence in an extreme and pathological form.”
As a result, all of us – including those of us who are poets – find ourselves faced with existential struggles that we can neither avoid nor ignore. Many years ago, I wrote a linguistic analysis of the metaphors in William Butler Year’s famous poem, “The Second Coming”, with its famous final lines
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Like Yeats, we who are poets may, if we are prescient enough, give people the mental tools they need to decide what to do with the time that is given to them. I hope that this issue will contribute something to that task.
My call for submissions asked for “protests, prophetic voices, … and poetic battles”. That is what this issue delivers. It contains thirteen poems and one article. Dennis Wise’s article discusses Charles R. Sleeth, first winner of the Cædmon Prize awarded by Đa Engliscan Gesiþas (The English Companions) for the best poem in the Old English style, and his prize-winning poem, “After the Flood”, in which Noah muses in the aftermath of the Biblical Deluge. The poems in this issue are mostly alliterative verse, though only a few poets (most notably Rahul Gupta) follow the strict Old English form. Audrey Hampton’s poem is alliterative and metrical. Pernille Bruhn’s “Come Home” and Ruth Aylett’s “Great-hearted Odysseus” are probably better described as alliterative free verse.
Oz Hardwick’s “True Thomas” reads like a Middle English alliterative prophecy, linking prodigies to current events. Unfortunately, it seems more prescient now than when it was first published in 2015. Lancelot Schaubert’s “Healthy Shame” is, on its face, a simple nature poem, but it is hard, in our current climate, not to read far more into it than that. Pernille Bruhn’s “Come Home” moves from an initial focus on the way “we plead / the small, hand-held gods / to sanctify our manic minds” to a final call for us “To remember / to let our deepest dreams dance / barefoot, begotten on the wild, / forgotten ground.”
Then we move on to harsher stuff. Lancelot Schaubert’s “The City Recruits from the Country” focuses on so-called random violence – whose causes are hidden precisely by everyone’s willful blindness. Audrey Hampton’s “The Fleece”, L. Erickson’s “Indivisible”, Michael Helsem’s “Rafflesiastes”, and Sarah Monnier’s “Grace” read like poems that might have been declaimed by one the fellows leading the pitchfork-carrying peasants during Wat Tyler’s revolt, way back in 1381. Ruth Aylett’s “Great-hearted Odysseus” takes us to task for taking heroic epics at face value. Lancelot Schaubert’s “Stripped to the Bonemeal” and my “Silence is not Safety” call upon the Biblical prophetic tradition, in which those who exploit the poor get very short shrift indeed. Rahul Gupta’s “Tropos: An Étude” examines the tension between the reality of violence in the Viking (or indeed any, age) and the way poets did, and can, transform the stuff of violence into beauty. Finally, Michael Hessel-Mial’s long poem projects the struggle between the few and the many into a science fiction – but only too believable – future.
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