1918 Isaac Rosenberg was born to a Jewish family that had recently emigrated to England from Lithuania, fleeing the tsar’s pogroms. The Rosenbergs moved, shortly before his birth, to London’s East End.
Isaac left school at fourteen to become an apprentice engraver. His family had fallen on hard times. He hated the work and continued his education – at great personal difficulty – at the University of London’s night school, Birkbeck College. Rosenberg had already displayed remarkable talent – artistic and literary. He studied intermittently at the Slade School, published his first volume of poetry in 1912, and had his first artwork exhibition in 1914.
He was also chronically invalid. His lungs were bad (TB, and other pulmonary ailments, were running at epidemic levels in the East End). Physically, he was a tiny 5 feet 3 inches.
These disqualifications, what with the trenches’ insatiable appetite for new blood as the Great War entered its most furious stage, did not trouble the nation’s recruiting sergeants. His country needed him. Despite deep-held pacifist beliefs (and a very German name) Rosenberg volunteered, and was sent to the front in 1915. He remained a private – declining any promotion, even to a lowly NCO rank. He was killed, in hand-to-hand combat, on April Fools’ Day in 1918. He had, a couple of days earlier, sent what would be his last poem to his friend and patron, Edward Marsh. Due to delays in getting correspondence from the trenches, the poem was not posted until 2 April, by the poet’s dead hand. Entitled ‘Through These Pale Cold Days’, the poem combines a powerful sense of impending death with an awareness of his racial heritage:
Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years,
And their wild eyes yearn,
While underneath their brows
Like waifs their spirits grope
For the pools of Hebron again —
For Lebanon’s summer slope.
They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead.
Rosenberg’s body was never identified among the other corpses, although a headstone was erected for him, with a Star of David on it and the inscription: ‘Artist and Poet’.