The British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson provided the title for an exhibition at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis that presented contemporary ceramics from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The phrase comes from the melancholy poem Maud, written around the time of the author’s more famous The Charge of the Light Brigade. It was not chosen as a description of the current state of the Baltic countries or Baltic ceramics, but it does point to the dark passages in the history of the Baltics and the depth, that is, complexity and profundity, of the issues surrounding their existence.¹