Over the next few weeks I shall be posting war poems by Isaac Rosenberg.
It is possible that you have not heard of him and are unfamiliar with his work. He was certainly unknown to me until fairly recently.
The following brief note is taken from the preface of "The Selected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg" (Edited by Jean Moorcroft Wilson - published by Cecil Woolf, London £6.95).
Isaac Rosenberg, who was killed on the Somme on April the first 1918, was one of the finest poets of the First World War. T.S. Eliot recognised his genius and Edith Sitwell described him as among 'the greatest poets we have had'.
Rosenberg is one of the very few poets of the war who came from a working-class background and served as a private soldier.
He was entirely frank about his motives for enlisting: 'I never joined the army for patriotic reasons' he wrote from his training depot. 'Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over'. Another reason for joining up, he admitted was that he was out of work.
Unlike the officer poets, Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Sorley and Graves, he saw war from a private's harsher and more realistic viewpoint and at times it appears to be a more authentic one.
Before the war he had been an art student, adding another unusual dimension to his work. at the Slade, and his poetic vision is also that of a painter.
Let's move on to what is considered by some people to be the best poem of WW1
BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES
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 men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
Isaac Rosenberg
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