Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890 in Bristol, the son of Lithuanian Jews who had moved to Britain a few years earlier. As a child, his teachers noticed his talent for drawing and writing poetry, but his parents couldn’t afford to keep him at school, and so he was apprenticed to an engraver’s company in 1905. In spite of this, Rosenberg attending evening classes in painting and drawing, and in the early 1910s a wealthy Jewish woman offered to pay his fees to attend art school. Before the war started he published two volumes of poems, one called Night and Day, and another Youth. Despite being resolutely pacifist, he enlisted for the war in 1915 – and wrote many poems while he was in the fighting until his death in 1918.
Image shows a lark sitting on a mossy branch.

Rosenberg contrasts the innocent song of birdsong with the horror of war.

In perhaps his best-known poem, ‘Returning, we hear the larks’, Rosenberg plays with the idea that the dread, foreboding and ultimate violent destruction of war has poisoned all of nature. The innocent song of larks in the dark is a pure, beautiful and strange comfort – but it is everywhere underlain with the threat that bullets, gas, and death might rain out of the night and onto the soldiers. The images of weightlessness and insubstantiality that pervade the final stanza: ‘a blind man’s dreams’ dropped on the sand by a violent sea, or the hair of a girl, are ultimately reversed, replaced in the final line by an image of a kiss that seems soft and light but conceals the poison of a snake:

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 on 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.
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...saac-rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg
Poet Details
1890–1918

Isaac Rosenberg may be remembered as a Jewish-English poet, or a poet of war, but his poetry stretches beyond those narrow categories. Since Rosenberg was only twenty-eight when he died, most critics have tended to treat his corpus as a promising but flawed start, and they wonder if he would have become a great poet had he lived. Rosenberg's status as an English poet is thus still debated: he was a Jewish poet, he was an English poet; he was a war poet, he was a painter-poet; he was a young poet; he was a great poet and a minor poet. In his brief career, Rosenberg created a small selection of poems and a great many questions.

Rosenberg was born on November 25, 1890 in Bristol. His parents, Dovber "Barnett" Rosenberg and Hacha "Hannah" Davidov Rosenberg, were Jewish immigrants from Russia. During Rosenberg's childhood, they moved into the squalid streets of London's Jewish ghetto, and there set up a butcher's shop. The shop was soon confiscated, however, and Rosenberg's parents were forced to work as itinerants during the rest of his life. Rosenberg himself was only able to attend school briefly; at age fourteen, he began to work as an engraver's apprentice, spending his spare time practicing painting. He eventually showed so much promise in the visual arts that he was granted funds to attend the Slade Art School, a significant center of aesthetic theory. The school—which trained artists of various stripes, including Rosenberg's friend Mark Gertler—prized originality above all, and rewarded students with vision above those with labored skill.

Rosenberg ultimately developed "infinity of suggestion," particularly in his poetry. But his early works seem too deeply influenced by the romantics to reveal much of Rosenberg's own voice. In Night and Day (1912), for example, Rosenberg's poems tend to ring with "poetical" sounding words, lending the verse a self-conscious, antique air. As Thomas Staley remarked in Dictionary of Literary Biography: "The poems in this thin volume are much like his early paintings in that they lacked originality, a distinctive voice. The influence of Shelley and Keats, especially Keats's 'Endymion,' is clear, and even the imagery is suffused with Keatsian diction. But the subject matter seems to probe beyond this influence to go backward in search of a more comprehensive vision of the world." Rosenberg produced one more volume of poetry, Youth (1915), before enlisting in a battalion to fight in World War I. Francine Ringold, writing for the Encyclopedia of World Literature, noted that Youth follows the general pattern of Night and Day: "all of these self-published works [Rosenberg's first volumes of poetry] demonstrate the moral earnestness and predilection for sonorous language that give R[osenberg]'s work its richness yet, when in excess, detract from its effectiveness." Irving Howe comments, similarly: "The early Rosenberg is always driving himself to say more than he has to say, because he thinks poets must speak to large matters. Later he learns that in a poppy in the trenches or a louse in a soldier's shirt, there is enough matter for poetry."

Rosenberg fought in World War I between 1915 and 1918, dying in the battle of Arras on April 1. During this period, his work reached a kind of early maturity; in this period he found a truly distinctive voice, one particularly indebted to the Old Testament and his sidelined Jewish identity. Many critics see Rosenberg strictly through his war poems. Others, however, insist that the war was only a subject for Rosenberg, or perhaps a challenge for which he was eminently suited. In many ways, Rosenberg's vision of the human relationship with God depends on his Jewish heritage—it depends on the metaphors of the Old Testament, at least. Rosenberg's Judaism is perhaps most apparent in his dramatic fragments, Moses and The Unicorn. "Had Rosenberg lived to develop further along the lines on which he had already moved," wrote David Daiches in Commentary, "he might have changed the course of modern English poetry, producing side by side with the poetry of Eliot and his school a richer and more monumental kind of verse, opposing a new romantic poetry to the new metaphysical brand."

Ultimately, critics tend to dismiss Rosenberg based on his brief career and his thin contribution to English letters. But in his final poems, Rosenberg offers something more than war poetry or Jewish English poetry. "The tragedy of war gave [his] affinities full expression in his later poems," Staley concluded, "and as war became the universe of his poetry, the power of his Jewish roots and the classical themes became the sources of his moral vision as well as his poetic achievement."
Bibliography

Night and Day, privately printed (London), 1912.
Youth, privately printed (London), 1915.
Moses: A Play, privately printed (London), 1916, facsimile edition, Imperial War Museum, Department of Printed Books (London), 1990.
Poems, edited by Gordon Bottomley, Heinemann (London), 1922.
The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Bottomley and Denys Harding, Chatto & Windus (London), 1937.
Collected Poems, edited by Bottomley and Harding, Chatto & Windus, 1949, Schocken, 1949, 1974.
The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg: Poetry, Prose, Letters, Paintings, and Drawings, edited by Ian Parsons, Chatto & Windus, 1979.
The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Vivien Noakes, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Further Readings

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 20: British Poets, 1914-1945, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983, pp. 318-21.
Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999, pp. 707-08.
Reference Guide to English Literature, 2nd edition, 3 volumes, St. James Press, 1991, pp. 1159-60.
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Volume 12, Gale, 1984, pp. 285-314.

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, autumn, 1980, Dan Jacobson, "The Burning of the Temple," pp. 564-67.
Commentary, July, 1950, David Daiches, "Isaac Rosenberg: Poet," pp. 91-93.
Critical Survey, Volume 2, number 2, 1990, Matt Simpson, "Only a Living Thing," pp. 128-36, Jennifer Breen, "Representations of the 'Feminine' in First World War Poetry," pp. 169-75; Volume 4, number 1, 1992, Diana Hendry, "Up with the Lark(s)," pp. 67-69.
English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Volume 39, number 2, 1996, Beth Ellen Roberts, "The Female God of Isaac Rosenberg," pp. 319-32.
New York Times, February 26, 1950, p. 5.*
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...s/detail/13535
Dead Man’s Dump
----- By Isaac Rosenberg
The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended—stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! have they gone into you!
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul’s sack
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
Those dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

A man’s brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer’s face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight.
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.



Break of Day in the Trenches
------------By Isaac Rosenberg


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.

Source: The Norton Anthology of Poetry Third Edition (1983)