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An old age passes; a new one gathers itself and assumes dreadful shape. In the great distance, a thundering wave approaches, invisible but long-rolling, while all close things yet abide in the hush of happy rest and contentment. Life itself seems to acquire the quality of a dream, year upon year, season after season: crowds murmur; nature grows hushed; the streets of cities turn still and calm, abandoned; thoughts wander and so often arrive at strange, unnerving places. Sleep itself is now a dream inside a dream; and always, at the very depth of night’s cavern, two eyes are discovered, revealed gradually: a face, a spirit, an accuser and an ally both – the figure of the mystery that seems to sweep over us. What will become of us, we wish to ask – but our dreams hold no answers.

It is a time of shadowy gods, the most obscure of them perhaps all but inexpressible. And yet a warm-cool upland extends as well, no less subconscious but of sunlit altitudes, comforting perhaps by being so uncanny – a soundless surrounding, the heart-thought of nebulous dangers put off into mythic distance. This too is as real as the lowest roots of earth, though much scorned and neglected by the mind of this world. Tell a man that hell is real and, if he’s sufficiently wise, he’ll fully understand you – but tell him that heaven is real as well and, however wise he be, the spirit of the age shall compel some part of him, at least, to smirk at you.

I assume a persona in writing this long work, and it is my sincere hope that the reader will forgive what may come across, as he reads the first poems, as affected tone and diction. It is not my choice. I have no part in these decisions, any of them. But it may help him somewhat in approaching this epic if I say that I write as an often-humorous and good-natured modern American who is channeling a kind of composite poet of the great English tradition sweeping from Chaucer through the last of the pre-modernists, who is in turn channeling some rough and rambunctious skald of the mysterious dark age North, that glorious gold-shining world fused together of snowflakes and flames. There are three universes at play here, intertwined and tangled: the tenebrous Hel of the primitive Norse Eddas, primordial, grim, frozen, and grand, glowing with the eyes of monsters and extravagant underworld wyrms; the high Gimle of the highest beauties produced in our language by masters such as Milton and the idyllic Tennyson; and lastly, my own rather humdrum little Midgard here, situated within the ken of both what’s above and what’s below, susceptible to the influence of both of those kingdoms, striving in inspiration to secure at least some hint of some merest suggestion of the wondrous dream-atmosphere of those opposite unfathomabilities. Perhaps the realms struggle, perhaps they war more than they coexist. But if battle wages, it is a battle in which blood is shared as well as shed, as All-Father mingles his thumb-blood with Loki’s.

I claimed a moment ago I bear no agency in this work’s composition. That’s the truth. At some point or other, an idea, a conceit, a twist, a phrase, a rhyme, an alliteration, a felicity occurs to one – or it doesn’t. All of the study and practice of poetry, it becomes clear, is but the rapping of knuckles on an ancient rock face to discover, by echoes, the hollow places and ways of access already within: the studying of clues and the searching of intuitions to at last reveal those secret panels that press open… the hidden doorway, the brittle façade that gives on to wondrous corridors reaching down to the very roots of time and existence. A verse put forth, if sufficiently crafted, has not indeed been crafted but only discovered; and such is true of all true strivings in all true poetries, all the paths of the ineffable. What remains uncertain, to this author at least, is whether the cave-ways converge, or indeed never reconcile. Far, far too few have been explored to even begin to know.

Meantime, the thunderous wave rolls on. It washes out the cancer of our hearts, the festering, the corruption – this time so sadness-beaten and world-sorrowful – our final stitch of strength and our last cynicism of unendurable sadness – washing this earth to clear it for its inevitable rebirth of the fresh and the glorious, a vision that brings tears, which is indeed only the rebirth of the Eternal Memory. And it is with trembling heart now that the neo-romantic soul proclaims the return of the lavish, the archaic, the baroque and the copious – a great renaissance and rediscovery of the scope and grandeur that poetry was always meant to be. Out from the dark, from the chilling wastes, a flame emerges – the hot and rejuvenating fire of a beaming brand. It is carried in a hand whose owner’s face is obscured – but we are not the less heartened, we the tear-stained and ecstatic inheritors of the world’s deepest wisdom, rallying to such a glorious revelation, for that fact.

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