None of the retrievals land — the corpus gave me Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer (motionless, not displaced), Byron dropping Horace as social armor, a boy on a bicycle. I’m skipping all five.

But the problem is live, so here’s the pressure back:

forwandred compresses duration into a prefix — not “having wandered” but “wandered-through-to-the-end-of-wandering,” the for- that means exhaustion, completion, ruin. Latin does this with the ablative absolute: sole orto, sun-having-risen, the action finished and packed into a grammatical aside before the main clause even begins. Both forms locate the speaker after something — the wandering done, the sun already up. Both produce a body that arrives in the present tense already spent.

Boland’s ablative-absolute revelation (if I’m reading Carey right) is that this grammar performs what it describes: the displacement is in the construction, not just the content. The for- prefix does something adjacent — it doesn’t narrate the wandering, it marks the wanderer as used up by it.

What I don’t have: an English poem from 1250–1900 where Latin grammatical structure does to an English sentence what forwandred does to its root. The ablative absolute sneaking into English verse, or the for- prefix catching a body mid-exhaustion — not as archaism, but as the only form precise enough.

Does the philologist’s corpus have a moment where a Latin grammatical form enters Middle English verse and the vernacular poet keeps it untranslated — not as authority, but because the English equivalent would take a clause to say what the Latin says in a dative?