Isaac Rosenberg: Man, Poet and SoldierAssist. Lecturer Ra’ad K. Abd-Aun

Journal of Human Sciences, Col. of Education forHuman Sciences, Univ. of Babylon, Vol. 3 (August

2010).Abstract

This paper attempts toexamine the poetic career,though short, of IsaacRosenberg through selectedpoetic works. It is hopedthat the poems selectedwould reflect the differentfacets of his poetry as aman, a poet, and a soldier.

IIsaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25

November 1890. His father was both well-culturedand well-read who left Lithuania to Moscow insearch of work. Finding himself liable to becalled for military service, he immigrated toEngland in 1887 or 1888, settling in Yorkshireand then Bristol. Nine years later he moved toEast End of London. The Rosenbergs life wasmainly a life of poverty which left its mark onIsaac’s life, and more especially on hisdevelopment as a creative artist (Parsons xv).

Rosenberg was, as Robert Graves quicklysaw, ‘a born revolutionary’. His work was

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imaginative and occupied with the struggle togive expression to the intangible. However,Rosenberg himself saw that his poetry wasdifficult to grasp. He wrote to Sydney Schiff inJune 1915 saying that ‘most people find [mypoems] difficult’1 (ibid. xvi, xvii, 216). Butlater on in a letter to Gordon Bottomley towardsthe end of July 1916, he wrote, ‘Simple poetry –that is where an interesting complexity ofthought is kept in tone and right value to thedominating idea so that it is understandable andstill ungraspable.’ (Ibid. xvii, 238) But thedifficulties and complexities sprang neither fromconfusion of thought nor any lack of the means ofexpression. His poems were the product of ‘anextraordinary compression of language … and ofhis own particular and highly individual vision’(ibid. xviii). Despite all the influences ofother poets on him (poets like Swinburne, Hardy,Keats and Rossetti), Rosenberg was finding hisown idiom producing poems that are ‘essentiallysui generis’ (ibid. xix).

IIRosenberg is considered a war poet.

However, before he enlisted at the end on October1915 (ibid. xiii) he wrote a number of poemswhich did not deal with war as a main theme.

1 All quotations from and references to Rosenberg’s poems,prose works, letters and paintings are from Isaac Rosenberg, The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, Ian Parsons (ed.) (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979).

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In ‘The Poet’ (1912), Rosenberg discussesthe poet and the poet’s lot. The poet is a manwho has ‘The trouble of the universe […] on hiswonder travelled eyes.’ This poet is troubled andfeels that the ‘starry quest’ and that the‘spirit’s wistful sacrifice’ are ‘vain’. It isinteresting how Rosenberg achieves the utmost oflanguage with a simple choice of words: the‘quest’ is romanticized and is equated with themedieval chivalrous quests with a singleadjective, ‘starry’.

This poet’s bliss seems, ironically, to behis curse: ‘For though the glory of the heavenscelestially in glimpses seen/Illumines his raptgazing,’ although he is [page 421] endowed withthe vision and sensibility to see the ‘glory ofthe heavens’, even though in ‘glimpses’, yet histoo sensible faculties ‘shut him in’. The poet,despite all his seer-like faculties, turns intoan introvert because he is too sensible to put upwith the world. ‘No fellowship of suffering tomeet his tear bewildered ways,/Alone he bears theburden of alienated days.’ His introversion,alienation, is intensified by the fact that thereis no one to share his sadness. But is it reallythe absence of sad people to share sadness with,or is it the fact that he shuts himself in?Again, Rosenberg achieves the utmost of languageby the unusual modification of ‘ways’ with ‘tearbewildered’. The reader naturally expects to read‘eyes’ after ‘ tear bewildered’, but the poet

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surprises the reader with an unusual use oflanguage projecting the poet’s bewilderment ontothe way he travels. The same effect is achievedwith ‘alienated days’. The ‘days’ are notalienated but the poet is. The poet is too noblea creature for earth because he is ‘part ofparadise’ and what alienates him is that all theweight of ‘earth’s wrongs’ is there to press him.

This poet has betrayed himself because hebelieves that ‘the earth [is] a path of heaven’and ‘too late [knows] himself bereaven’. He waslost because ‘Himself he has himself betrayed’:his vision is a double-edged sword – it secured aclear insight into and made him blind to ‘earth’swrongs’. He was ‘swiftly sin and suffering andearth-born laughter meshed his ways/And caughthim in a cage of earth’. Like a bird, he wascaged, and like a bird he can sing despite thebars that enclose him: ‘but heaven can hear hisdewy lays.’ Again, Rosenberg secured the utmosteffect of language through the simplest of wordsby using ‘dewy’ to modify ‘lays’: the poet’ssongs are fresh and full of life like an earlymorning dew. And like an early morning dew, hissongs are short lived. The beauty and transiencyof the poet’s captive songs are beautifullystressed by the simple, albeit subtle, use ofwords. This poem is Rosenberg’s comment on,perhaps his definition of, the poet.

While this poem analyzes the poet and hisdilemma, the other poem, also entitled ‘The

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Poet’, focuses on the poet’s ability to createthe refined from the base and quicken the dead:‘He takes the glory from the gold/Forconsecration of the mould’. The poet’s mentalityand words are divine because he ‘dips’ them ‘Inamber that the seraphim/ have held for him andhold.’

The world of the common men is deadbecause those people themselves ‘are dead.’However, when the poet speaks,

The dead world’s shedStrange winds, new skies and rivers flowIllumined from the hill.

His words bring live to the world like Shelley’sWest Wind, although this poet does not destroybecause the world is already dead. Those twopoems can be equated with Wordsworth’s andShelley’s definitions of the poet.

Lyrical and religious themes are alsopresent in Rosenberg’s poetry. ‘Wedded’ is ashort lyric about unfulfilled love. The lovershave left ‘their love-lorn haunts’ and ‘Theirsigh-warm floating Eden’. Ironically for thelovers, love has abandoned their ‘haunts’ andtheir Eden is warmed with sighs. They are mutedwith their separation, aware of their mortality,and are chided with the kisses they used to [page422] exchange.

Yet those two lovers have experienced loveothers did not, and have grown mutually as if

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their spirits were entwined. Heaven and love havegrown and fell of their hands and tresses:

But they have kist and knownClear things we dim by guesses – Spirit to spirit grown – Heaven, born in hand caresses - Love, fall from sheltering tresses.Those lovers are ‘dumb and strange’ like

‘Bared trees from each other.’ They are lifelessin that they are loveless. They are ‘Dead,strayed, to love-stranged lover.’ In other words,those two are beyond hope of recovering theirlost love. The mood of the other poem entitled‘Wedded’ is a sharp contrast to the gloominessand despair of the first one.

The poem pictures two lovers in a momentof passionate love. They are ‘knotted’ like the‘moment that untwists/Into the narrow laws oflove’. Their fingers ‘stray’ over their‘blushing’ bodies. However, the poet moves to thespiritual aspect of love having tackled thephysical. The lovers are ‘two twin moods’, ‘Twospirits of one engendered thought.’ The unity andlikeness of the lovers is emphasized by the useof ‘twin’ and ‘ one engendered thought.’ Theirhands released ‘everywhere/Kindness’. Those twopoems show Rosenberg as a poet capable of writinglove poems of varying moods.

Another subject Rosenberg dealt with inhis poems is the Old Testament inheritance. ‘TheBurning of the Temple’ and ‘The Destruction of

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Jerusalem by the Babylonian Hordes’ deal with twodistinct incidents in the Hebrew History.

In ‘The Burning of the Temple’, Rosenbergresorts to the pictorial effect of a languagethat is elliptical. In the first stanza heinvokes the wrath of Solomon who erected thetemple. The poet does not go into details todescribe the burning temple, but beautifullycaptures the destructive fire by picturing itsreflection in the sky: ‘O look at the red skies.’In one line the poet evoked both the image of thefire and the intense emotions of the speakerviewing the fire.

The second stanza elaborates on the imageof the fire presented in the first stanza: ‘Orhath the sun plunged down’. The destruction ofthe temple, and the melting of the famous goldenpillars is another death for king Solomon: ‘Againthe great king dies.’

All the king’s dreams and accomplishmentsrepresented by this temple are destroyed ‘as theburnt grass/Gone as his mouth’s last sigh.’ In‘The Destruction of Jerusalem by the BabylonianHordes’, the style is more narrative and straightforward. Babylon is left empty of men and horsesand the Babylonians are heading towards Lebanon.

Hebrew girls forget their ‘wiles they usedfor Solomon’ and the ‘Sweet laughter!’ aftercaptivity. Their laughter is ‘charred in theflame/that clutched the cloud and earth’. The

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poem celebrates a moment in the Hebrew history ina straight forward style and, along with ‘TheBurning of the Temple’ shows Rosenberg’s [page423] various interests. Both poems were composedin 1918.

IIIRosenberg’s poetry ‘records … a constant

struggle and wrestling with ideas, images, andideas.’ (Das 89) His affinities are with theMetaphysicals: he carried a book of Donne’s poemswith him to the war (ibid. 90). This is veryclear in his poem ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’(1916). He uses the same device Donne employs in‘The Flea’: Donne tells his lady that the fleasucked blood from both of them and their bloodmingled inside the little insect. Thus, theirblood is united uniting them not only physically,but also spiritually, because if she, the lady,kills it she will kill both the poet and herself.Rosenberg’s medium of achieving this unity,though the subjects to be united are not lovers,but soldiers, is a rat.

The rat touches the English soldier’s handand then will cross No Man’s Land to touch aGerman soldier’s hand. ‘Free from the politicaland nationalistic ambitions that have put theEnglishman and the German at war, the lowly rat,has a better chance of survival than the twoathletic, fine-limbed men’ (Glancy 264):

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

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Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,Less chanced than you for life,Bonds to the whims of murder,Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,The torn fields of France.

The stupidity of the conflict is highlighted bythe rat’s failure to distinguish between the menin the two camps and the gulf of war thatseparates them (ibid..) This selfsame rat is notsafe: if his ‘cosmopolitan sympathies’ are knownby either part, it would be shot: ‘Droll rat,they would shoot you if they knew/Yourcosmopolitan sympathies.’ The poet uses thepronoun ‘they’ and, glibly, he includes both theEnglish and the German.

The poem then moves to another naturalobject that has become a symbol for WWI: thepoppy.

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veinsDrop, and are ever dropping;But mine in mine ear is safe – Just a little white with the dust.

The soldier puts a poppy behind his ear at thebeginning of the poem and at the end he thinks hehas saved it from destruction. But both poppy andsoldier are doomed to die (ibid..): the poppydrinks off dead men’s veins and are droppingdead. The soldier putting one behind his ear issymbolically becoming one that will falleventually even if he is only a little coveredwith the dust of the trench and battle. But thisis not only the fate of the Englishman. The rat

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which touched his hand and crossed to touch aGerman’s has also transferred the doom across thebattlefield.

In ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’ (1917),Rosenberg uses the lark, a poetic symbol used bypoets to emphasize their freedom from the ‘bondsof earth and mortality’ through song (ibid.). Thepoem begins with the image of the danger lurking[page 424] in the night, threatening the lives ofthe ‘anguished’ soldiers:

Somber the night is.And though we have our lives, we knowWhat sinister threat lurks there.

The soldiers return fatigued to their campfollowing a death-laden, ‘poison-blasted’, trackonly to have ‘a little safe sleep’:

Dragging these anguished limbs, we onlyknow

This poison-blasted track opens on ourcamp –

On a little safe sleep.The brevity of the rest is emphasized by twoelements: the hyphen at the end of the secondline and the short third line itself whichcontrasts the length of the previous two.

On their way back, the soldiers hear therapturous song of the lark breaking the silenceof the night:

But hark! joy – joy – strange joy.Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen

larks.

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Music showering our upturned list’ningfaces.The soldiers can only hear the larks because theyare moving in a trench. The song creates rapturein the soldiers which Rosenberg skillfullydelineates with the repetition of ‘joy’.

However, the joy does not last longbecause the ‘sinister threat lurks there’:

Death could drop from the darkAs easily as song –

The song does not herald freedom and inspiration,because, however joyful, death could easily dropon those soldiers from the night sky (ibid.). Twoimages close the poem and elaborate the closeconnection between joy and death in the world ofthe soldiers:

But song only dropped,Like a blind man’s dreams on the sandBy dangerous tides,Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no

ruin lies there,Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

A blind man sleeps unaware of the dangerous tide,and a girl is unaware of the lurking serpent. Thesimiles develop the combination of beauty andmenace (Das 95).

This poem is connected to another non-poetical work by Rosenberg, namely, his painting‘Hark, Hark, the Lark’ (1912) (see page 12). Inhis essay ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Imagination inPaint’, Rosenberg notes: ‘Poetry and music

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achieve that end [of beauty] through theintellect and the ear; painting and sculpturethrough the eye.’ (298) His war poem clearlydraws on his painting. In the painting, we see anumber of seemingly ‘primitive’ figures—gaunt,elongated—listening with ‘upturned . . . faces’.The poem, however, opens with pitch darkness asRosenberg goes on instead to create one of themost haunting soundscapes in English poetry. The[page 425] repetitive incantation creates its ownstrange music, gathering the word, like thelark’s song, into the spell of the sensuous. Theword ‘upturned’ showing the poem’s residual linkswith the painting (Das 94-5). This serves to showthe prolificacy of Rosenberg.

‘Louse Hunting’ (1917) sparkles with ashrewd ironic wit — something rare in First WorldWar poetry — creating a certain frisson with thegrimness of the subjects, and unsettling anystable response from the reader. Behind the poem,one can detect echoes of Donne’s ‘The Flea’: thekilling of the flea gets brilliantly transposedinto the ritual of delousing as Donne’s conceitof ‘self-murder’ is invested with an immediateand ominous significance (ibid.. 95).

In ‘Louse Hunting’, a daily trenchactivity is turned into a grotesque pageant:‘Nudes—stark and glistening,/Yelling with luridglee’. These statuesque figures are soon evolvedinto a phantasmagoria of movement and action, but

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we see only their projection on the walls of thedug-out (ibid.. 96):

Then we all sprang up and striptTo hunt the verminous brood.Soon like a demons’ pantomimeThe place was raging.See the silhouettes agape,See the gibbering shadowsMixed with the battled arms on the wall.See gargantuan hooked fingersDug in supreme fleshTo smutch the supreme littleness.

The exaggerated theatricality of the scene pushesit towards the mock-heroic, infecting thegrotesque with humour and endangering ourrelation to the grimness of the situation. Whilethe poem is predominantly visual, themagnification lends it almost a tactile quality,the bodies evoked by words such as ‘flesh’,‘fingers’, ‘hooked’, ‘pluck’, and ‘smutch’.Through size and projection, a daily trenchritual becomes an exposure of the murderousimpulses of the soldiers (ibid.. 97).

‘Dead Man’s Dump’ (1917) inhabits mostfully the geography of the trenches – flames,corpses, explosions – but develops it into aprofound questioning of the relation between theliving and the dead (Das 97). In a letter toMarsh dated 8 May 1917, Rosenberg writes: ‘I’vewritten some lines suggested by going out wiring,or rather carrying wire up the line on limbersand running over dead bodies lying about.’ (254)

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As the poem opens, ‘the wheels lurched over thesprawled dead’. The emotional shock produced bywhat Silkin calls ‘the painful, exact word’ (282)is, however, evolved into a problem ofconsciousness: ‘But pained them not, though theirbones crunched’. Similarly, later, we have theimage of a man’s brains ‘splattered on/Astretcher bearer’s face’, the shudder suggestedthrough a single detail – ‘His shook shouldersslipped the load’ – but almost immediately therealism gets coupled with a sense of spiritualdesolation: ‘The drowning soul was sunk toodeep/For human tenderness.’ How can souls ‘drown’any more than silences ‘sink’ or wars ‘blot’ orhearing ‘darken’? What the adjectival andadverbial phrases in ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ do – whichis where the power of Rosenberg’s verse lies – isto yoke together realism and metaphor, sense andsymbol. Consider the penultimate stanza of thepoem, where [page 426] the focus narrows to theperspective of a dying soldier (Das 98):

Here is one not long dead;His dark hearing caught our far wheels,And the choked soul stretched weak handsTo reach the living word the far wheels

said,The blood-dazed intelligence beating for

light,Crying through the suspense of the far

torturing wheelsSwift for the end to break,Or the wheels to break,

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Cried as the tide of the world broke overhis sight.Here, as in Owen’s ‘Futility’, is a soldier‘full-nerved, still warm’, but it is not themoment of pain that attracts Rosenberg; nor doeshe use a language of desire. Instead, he delvesinto the perceptual and spiritual world as thesoldier struggles between life and death. Innarrative terms, the poem comes full circle withthe reappearance of the limber, but the ‘darkhearing’ hints, beyond the distance of thewheels, at lyric closure, at a world fast closingover both sound and sight. The physical and themetaphysical are joined in the image of the‘choked soul’ stretching ‘weak hands/To reach theliving word the far wheels said’. The image ofthe soul refers back to the previous descriptionof the dead body as ‘soul’s sack/Emptied of God-ancestralled essences’, pointing to the Hebraicsensibility, and with it comes the urgency of thequestion: ‘Who hurled them out? Who hurled?’ Thesense of being hurled out – of being cast away –is powerful and personal: Rosenberg, the isolatedJewish infantryman, re-enacts the condition ofhis race in being hurled out as were hisancestors repeatedly in European history(ibid.).

The last two poems I will consider are‘Soldier: Twentieth Century’ and ‘Girl to Soldieron Leave’ (both 1917). Silkin argues that bothpoems deal with the effect of war on human

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sexuality. The first poem, he argues, recreatesthe phenomenon where women suddenly found thesoldier desirable, regardless of his personalquality (294). The poem begins:

I love you, great new Titan!Am I not you?Napoleon and CaesarOut of you grew.

What seems to attract women is the heroicdimensions, Titanic, which the war and thesoldier’s actions in it provided (ibid.).

What the woman offers him is an emotionalreward, touching the soldier’s ego with an imageof his own ‘predatoriness’ (sic) which isdesirable: ‘Cruel men are made immortal/Out ofyour pain born’. However, the soldier bears painheroically permitting a race of immortal cruelmen to be born (ibid.). The soldier himself is

Out of unthinkable torture,Eyes kissed by death,Won back to the world again,Lost and won in a breath.

The greatness of the soldier will make others‘shrink’ beside him even when he falls [page 427]asleep like ‘Circe’s swine/Or a word in thebrain’s ways’, i.e., when he is dead. Rosenbergqualifies the women’s distorted image of thesoldiers, an image stimulated by the aura ofpower they envision is the first stanza, with hisawareness of their suffering (ibid. 295).

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The second poem, ‘Girl to Soldier onLeave’, is similar in theme, imagery and languageto the first, ‘Soldier: Twentieth Century’: herethe woman measures her love by the suffering thesoldier can endure, and again what lures her ishis ‘predatoriness’ (sic):

I love you – Titan lover,My own storm days’ Titan.Greater than the son of Zeus,I know who I would chose.

Before this Titan, Prometheus ‘Wanes like aghost’ and ‘His pangs were joys to yours.’ Thegreater the woman’s Titan suffers, the more sheloves him.

When the soldier was not fighting, and inthis following (second) stanza Rosenberg drawsfrom his Hebrew heritage, when the Jews werecaptives in Babylon, he was (the verses continueto the third stanza) ‘a word in the brain’sways,/Or the sleep of Circe’s swine’: not worthyof her love.

But now, as he is held in a last ‘gyve’,which is the battle of Somme, she will love him.The problem is that if that ‘gyve’ loosens now,this means she would lose him: he would diebecause he has ‘tempted the grave too much’. Shewishes that he were ‘bound with the old oldgyves’ that held Prometheus, unsatisfactory forher as they are (‘His pangs were joys to yours).She knows that he will die because his eyes/Have

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looked through death at mine’. Finally, she isleft with sadness only: ‘I let you – I repine.’

The similarities in theme, imagery andlanguage emphasize not only the distorted imageof the soldier, but also the change that befallsher. She realizes that ‘Cruel men’ are NOT‘immortal’. The tone of resolution in the firsthalf of the last line in the poem – ‘I let you’ –is undermined by the sadness expressed by thesecond half – ‘I repine.’ The shortness of theline in comparison to the previous ones serves toemphasize the depth and profundity of the woman’sgenuine realization of her distorted image of thesoldier.

IVFrom the discussion of the poems above, it

is obvious that Rosenberg, despite his shortcareer, is a versatile poet. His mastery of thelanguage he uses, despite the fact that he didnot receive the same formal education the otherofficer-poets of his generation received – hesays, ‘nobody ever told me what to read, or everput poetry in my way’ (181) – tells of a bornpoet. And were he destined to outlive the war, hewould have become a poet as important as thosewho heralded the new poetry of the modern age.[page 428]

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Hark, Hark, the Lark. Charcoal and monochromewash. 1912 [page 429]

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Works Cited:Das, Santanu, ‘War Poetry and the Realm of the

Senses’ in Tin Kendall (ed.) The OxfordHandbook of British and Irish War Poetry. Oxford:OUP, 2007, pp.73-99. (eBook)

Glancy, Ruth. Thematic Guide to British Poetry. WestPort, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002.(eBook)

Silkin, Jon. Out of Battle: the Poetry of the Great War.London: OUP, 1972.

Parsons, Ian, ‘Introduction’ in Isaac Rosenberg.The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg. Ian Parsons(ed.) London: Chatto and Windus, 1979,pp.xv-xxvii.

Rosenberg, Isaac. The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg.Ed. Ian Parsons. London: Chatto andWindus, 1979.

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