Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25 November 1890. His parents had emigrated from Russia some years before. When he was seven, the family moved to the East End of London in search of better-paid work, but they were not successful and the boy, whose health had never been good, developed a lung ailment. From the Board School of St George’s in the East he went on to Stepney Board School, where his natural gift for drawing and writing so impressed the headmaster that he allowed him to spend most of his time on them. Out of school, he read poetry and drew with chalks on the pavements of the East End.
Obliged to leave school at fourteen, he was apprenticed to the firm of Carl Hertschel, engravers, in Fleet Street. His parents hoped that this might prove a stepping-stone to an artist’s career, but Isaac hated the work, writing in a letter: ‘It is horrible to think that all these hours, when my days are full of vigour and my hands craving for self-expression, I am bound, chained to this fiendish mangling machine, without hope and almost desire of deliverance.’ Such phrasing shows the stamp of an earlier London poet and artist, William Blake, who was to remain the most potent influence on Rosenberg’s writings. The earliest of his poems that survive, his ‘Ode to David’s Harp’, was written when he was fifteen and included this stanza:
The harp that faster caused to beat
The heart that throbbed for war,
The harp that melancholy calmed,
Lies mute on Judah’s shore.
One chord awake – one strain prolong
To wake the zeal in Israel’s breast;
Oh sacred lyre, once more, how long?
’Tis vain, alas! in silence rest.
The influence here is one of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies: the lines beginning ‘The harp the monarch minstrel swept’. Robert Graves said that Rosenberg, as a poet, was ‘a born revolutionary’, and certainly he stands in the line of such earlier revolutionaries as Blake, Byron, and Shelley. The subject of the ‘Ode to David’s Harp’, and its relation to Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, are also significant. Rosenberg was a Jew, steeped in Hebrew mythology and legend, but he had little Hebrew and less Yiddish, and the vision of his mature work was cosmic rather than sectarian, personal rather than specifically Jewish. Siegfried Sassoon – a fellow Jew – put it well:
I have recognized in Rosenberg a fruitful fusion between English and Hebrew culture. Behind all his poetry there is a racial quality – biblical and prophetic. Scriptural and sculptural are the epithets I would apply to him.
Rosenberg wrote poems during his lunch-hours in Fleet Street, and in the evenings attended classes at the Art School of Birkbeck College. At last, his apprenticeship completed, he was free and in 1911 three generous Jewish women undertook to pay his tuition fees at the Slade School of Fine Art. There he came to know the artists Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer, William Roberts, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer, but increasingly found art and poetry incompatible and was drawn more towards poetry. ‘Art is not a plaything,’ he wrote, ‘it is blood and tears, it must grow up with one; and I believe I have begun too late.’ Even so, he was a capable draughtsman and painted some impressive landscapes, portraits and allegorical scenes, a few of which were shown at the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition of twentieth-century art in 1914.
Rosenberg shop, Steward Street, East End of London
On leaving the Slade, he considered going to Russia, but it was difficult for a Jew to get a passport and he abandoned the idea. He had hoped to earn a living from his portraits, but in 1914 was told that his lungs were weak and was advised to seek a warmer climate. Having a married sister in Cape Town, he sailed for South Africa in June. There he painted some pictures, gave a series of lectures on modern art, and published a few articles and poems, but he was far from happy, as he made clear in a letter to Eddie Marsh (see p. 12):
I am in an infernal city by the sea. This city has men in it – and these men have souls in them – or at least have the passages to souls. Though they are millions of years behind time, they have yet reached the stage of evolution that knows ears and eyes. But these passages are dreadfully clogged up: gold dust, diamond dust, stocks and shares, and Heaven knows what other flinty muck.
His reactions to the outbreak of The First World War were complex and found their way into a poem:
Snow is a strange white word;
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.
Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know.
No man knows why.
Rosenberg (kneeling far left) at the annual Slade School of Art picnic, 1912
In all men’s hearts it is.
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.
Red fangs have torn His face.
God’s blood is shed.
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.
O! ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume.
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.
His letter speaks of ‘an infernal city’, but so strong was the shaping influence of the pastoral tradition that, when he came to write his poem, the ominous snow – the ‘strange white word’ – was inscribed not in a cityscape but a landscape. He perceives the approaching violence more distinctly than many other poets; it is an ‘ancient crimson curse’, but he hopes it may have a purging effect and restore the universe to its original prelapsarian innocence and beauty.
Title page of Rosenberg’s play Moses, published in 1916
Although Rosenberg was later to express a dislike of Brooke’s ‘begloried sonnets’ (as he called them), one of his own 1914 poems, ‘The Dead Heroes’, reveals a patriotism which, if less personal, is hardly less ardent:
Flame out, you glorious skies,
Welcome our brave,
Kiss their exultant eyes;
Give what they gave.
Flash, mailèd seraphim,
Your burning spears;
New days to outflame their dim
Heroic years.
Thrills their baptismal tread
The bright proud air;
The embattled plumes outspread
Burn upwards there.
Flame out, flame out, O Song!
Star ring to star,
Strong as our hurt is strong
Our children are.
Their blood is England’s heart;
By their dead hands
It is their noble part
That England stands.
England –Time gave them thee;
They gave back this
To win Eternity
And claim God’s kiss.
Rosenberg’s three-fold repetition of ‘England’ calls to mind its four-fold repetition in Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ (see p. 20), and his patriotic sentiments are more commonplace than those expressed in Brooke’s sonnet. What Rosenberg really seems to be celebrating here is the English language: the language of Blake with its fire, spears, seraphim and stars. At much the same time, Wilfred Owen was writing: ‘Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote.’
Isaac Rosenberg (seated) with his brother, Elkon, September 1917
In 1915 Rosenberg returned to England, where he published a small pamphlet of poems, Youth, and then enlisted in what was called the Bantam Regiment, being, as he said, ‘too short for any other’. He enlisted purely to help his family, having been told that half his pay could be paid to his mother as a separation allowance. From the first, he hated the army, and the army, in the person of his ‘impudent schoolboy pup’ of an officer, disliked him. The Rosenbergs were ‘Tolstoyans’ and Isaac, himself the most vulnerable of men, hated the idea of killing. However, after a period of training at Bury St Edmunds and at Farnborough, he crossed the Channel early in 1916 with the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment. He had not been at the Front long when he sent Eddie Marsh ‘a poem I wrote in the trenches, which is surely as simple as ordinary talk’. This was ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ (see p. 173 for a corrected typescript):
Letter from Rosenberg to Sonia Rodker
The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
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.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver – what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe –
Just a little white with the dust.
Letter from Rosenberg to R. C. Trevelyan
Rosenberg has absorbed – and in ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ looks back on – the great tradition of pastoral poetry: his poppy nods to the rose of George Herbert’s poem ‘Virtue’:
Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Curiously, though, given the battlefield context of Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day’, his tone is lighter, more informal and ironic than that of his peacetime predecessors. As his day breaks, ‘The darkness crumbles away’ like the dusty edge of the trench parapet that is the speaker’s horizon. In the strange sentence that follows – ‘It is the same old druid Time as ever’ – we can see the figure of Old Father Time personified as a druid (standing perhaps before a druidic sacrificial altar), and can hear an alternative and complementary meaning: it is a customary time for druidic sacrifice – dawn. The colloquial setting of this image saves it from portentousness, and there is a wry good humour (altogether foreign to the great pastoral elegies) in the entrance on stage of the poem’s protagonists:
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear
Sketch by Rosenberg
– just where a bullet might be expected to open another red flower if he were to lift his head above the parapet. But he keeps his head down because in this world of anti-pastoral the roles of man and rat are reversed: the man hiding as the rat commutes between the British and German lines. The creature is imagined to be inwardly grinning – in vengeful mockery, perhaps – as it passes the bodies of its former hunters, now
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
The prophecy of ‘On Receiving News of the War’ – ‘Red fangs have torn His face’ – has been fulfilled. Man and Nature personified have both been torn. The poppy, too, has been torn from its root ‘in man’s veins’ and, when we are told that the flower
Just a little white with the dust
we know that, far from being safe, poppy and man are ever dropping towards the charnel dust.
This poem represents an advance on ‘The Dead Heroes’ as astonishing as that of Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ on his poems of 1914. And not the least astonishing thing about ‘Break of Day’ is its impersonality, the total absence of the bitterness and indignation characteristic of Owen’s poems. Rosenberg is even capable of expressing active happiness, the ‘lurid glee’, as he calls it, of the demonic pantomime described in the poem ‘Louse Hunting’, or the purer joy of ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’:
Men resting in a shell hole, 1918
Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp –
On a little safe sleep.
But hark! joy – joy – strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.
Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song –
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams
no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
Corrected typescript of Rosenberg’s poem ‘Daughters of War’
This, Rosenberg’s most complex version of pastoral, evokes – even, obliquely, invokes – Shelley’s poem ‘To a Skylark’, whose ‘unbodied joy . . . Showers a rain of melody’. The Romanic poet had supposed his sky-lark possessed of higher knowledge than himself:
Working party, January 1917
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true or deep
Than we mortals dream
By contrast, Rosenberg frames the lyrical centre of his poem with darker perceptions of destruction, but they are significantly different. Whereas the first six lines are grimly realistic, the bird’s song diminishes the horror:
Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song –
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams
no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
Those closing similes reflect, like the similes in Shelley’s poem, the poet’s search for the precise quality of his inner experience: their happy dreams (in the shadow of perils imperceived) at once fulfilling and complicating the earlier promise of ‘a little safe sleep’.
In poems like this and his masterpiece, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ (a title inviting comparison with ‘The Dead Heroes’), Rosenberg succeeded in his intention of writing what he called ‘Simple poetry, – that is where an interesting complexity of thought is kept in tone and right value to the dominating idea so that it is understandable and still ungraspable.’
On 28 March 1918 he ended a letter to Eddie Marsh:
I think I wrote you I was about to go up the line again after our little rest. We are now in the trenches again, and though I feel very sleepy, I just have a chance to answer your letter, so I will while I may. It’s really my being lucky enough to bag an inch of candle that incites me to this pitch of punctual epistolary. I must measure my letter by the light [. . ..]
Before this letter was postmarked 2 April 1918, Isaac Rosenberg was dead.
Self-portrait sketch in a letter, 1917
Self-portrait in a pink tie, 1914
What in our lives is burnt
In the fire of this?
The heart’s dear granary?
The much we shall miss?
Three lives hath one life –
Iron, honey, gold.
The gold, the honey gone –
Left is the hard and cold.
Iron are our lives
Molten right through our youth.
A burnt space through ripe fields,
A fair mouth’s broken tooth.
1916
A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,
Babylon and Rome:
Not Paris raped tall Helen,
But this incestuous worm,
Who lured her vivid beauty
To his amorphous sleep.
England! Famous as Helen
Is thy betrothal sung
To him the shadowless,
More amorous than Solomon
1916
Nudes – stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he’d lit while we lay.
Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons’ pantomime
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the gibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.
1917
