What Have We All Forgotten - Analysis

The refrain as an accusation: prosperity with amnesia

The poem’s central claim is that the nation’s loud successes have been bought at the price of a shared moral forgetting. The repeated question What have we all forgotten acts like a conscience that keeps interrupting celebration. Lawson places the question against time-markers that should suggest maturity and judgment—the break of the seventh year, the dawn of the seventh day, and finally the eleventh hour. The implication is that enough time has passed for gratitude, responsibility, or self-knowledge to have settled in, yet instead the country drifts into a kind of ethical sleep.

The “Bad Time” corpse: a past that won’t stay buried

The opening makes forgetting feel not merely careless but indecent. A Bad Time is carried on a bier, and the poem catalogues what “covers” it: Public robbing, lying, Private strife, deception, then Drinking and gambling. The repetition of Cover suggests a deliberate refusal to look at what has happened and what it has done to people. Even the phrase that death cannot erase insists that time and mortality don’t cleanse public wrongdoing; the past remains morally present, even if the nation tries to bury it under distraction and vice.

Full tanks and empty attention: abundance as moral noise

The second stanza turns to abundance—tanks are full, and by lonely sidings sit mountains of wheat and wool. These details are concrete, almost proud, yet the pride is undercut by what the plenty produces: Country crowds to the city, money to spend with the best, and carnival kings in power. The lights and carnivals aren’t condemned because joy is wrong; they’re troubling because they become a glare that makes the harder questions harder to see. In that glare, forgetting looks like a civic habit—built into consumption, spectacle, and the easy confidence of being well-fed.

Nation-building and the missing gifts: “peace and rain”

Lawson’s speaker does not deny real achievement: brought the states together, garnered and reaped, and worked in glorious weather. But he keeps slipping in what that progress may cost. The striking image of coming from grass-waves flowing into cities under Heaven’s electric lamps makes modernization feel like a replacement of older rhythms—weather, land, seasons—with human brightness and speed. The question Did we send the peace and the rain? is the poem’s most pointed contradiction: the nation can “make” sordid cities into jovial camps, can cleanse townships, can “gain,” yet it cannot command the elemental conditions of life. The line reads like a rebuke to arrogance and also a reminder that prosperity is partly received, not earned.

A turn inward: confession inside the chorus of “we”

The final stanza shifts from public indictment to self-implication. The speaker inserts parentheses—I the greater the sinner, I and the most ungrateful—and suddenly the poem’s “we” is not a distant crowd but a mirror. This turn changes the tone: earlier it is scathing and urgent; now it is penitential, almost raw with embarrassment at being doubly blessed and still unthankful. The phrase Sinners to self and to country! also tightens the poem’s moral logic: private failure and public failure aren’t separate. A nation’s corruption is not only “out there” in officials; it is sustained by personal ingratitude, self-deception, and the willingness to look away.

What, exactly, is being “forgotten”?

The poem never names the forgotten thing in a single phrase, and that omission is part of its pressure. The best answer the poem offers is not information but a posture: the willingness to kneel, to remember dependence, to refuse the fantasy that success proves virtue. When Lawson ends with thank the Great Spirits for Good, he is not simply advocating piety; he is demanding an honest accounting of how easily “good” becomes entitlement. The poem’s harshness comes from this: a glorious home is not safe from moral collapse, and the very signs of national arrival—full tanks, electric lamps, carnival power—may be the things that help a people forget to be just, truthful, and grateful.