'Nothing Dead Must Stay That Way'

The editors of An Outcast Age (Little Gidding Press, 2021), Clinton Collister and Dan Rattelle, call their collection “an anthology of Christian verse.” The twenty-four poets whose work is included are weighted toward the Anglican, though at least two are Roman Catholic. Doctrinal differences are less important than a dedication to traditional form (meter, rhyme) and to what David Cameron calls in his poem “the sudden certitude / That saved us from solitude.” 

The collection takes its title from an early poem by Jonathan Swift, “Ode to Dr. William Sancroft” (c. 1692), written in imitation of Abraham Cowley imitating Pindar. It’s a young man’s poem, too long, “poetic” and dull but it concludes with memorable lines:

 

“Check in thy satire, angry muse

            Or a more worthy subject choose:

Let not the outcasts of this outcast age

Provoke the honour of my Muse’s rage,

Nor be thy mighty spirit rais’d,

Since Heaven and Cato both are pleased—”

 

That’s the only appearance of the word satire in the ode. Sancroft (1617-93) was the Archbishop of Canterbury imprisoned in 1688 for libel against King James II. As he writes, Swift (b. 1667) is still in his twenties. His defense of Sancroft is an early indication of his later ecclesiastical conservatism. In 1695 he would be ordained as a priest in the Church of Ireland, the Irish branch of the Anglican Church.

 

Several of the poems in An Outcast Age rely on familiarity with history. “Compiègne” by Catharine Savage Brosman recounts a visit to the small city in northern France where Germany surrendered to the Entente in 1918, ending World War I. In 1940, Hitler compelled the French to sign the surrender documents in the same railway carriage where Germany had surrendered twenty-two years earlier.

 

“Surrender must be recognized as shame,

der Führer vowed.  He chose the railroad car

where Germany, defeated, signed its name,

the very clearing, to efface the scar

 

“of deep humiliation he had borne.

Defeat ate at his psyche, a disease

that found relief in madness.  He had sworn

to humble Frankreich, bring her to her knees— . . .”

 

In “Cædmon,” Jane Blanchard writes of the earliest poet to have written in Old English. He was a cowherd and lay brother in Northumbria, and lived from roughly 657 to 684 A.D. Blanchard’s poem concludes: “Taught sacred matters, he turned them to verse: / Vernacular, it was, and not for worse.”

 

In “Stumbling Upon Akeldama in Winter,” Matthew J. Andrews writes of the place in Jerusalem associated with Judas Iscariot. In Aramaic, Akeldama means “field of blood.” In the poem’s final lines, Andrews writes:

 

“Nothing dead must

stay that way.

Morning light brings

night’s decay.”