In this poem Rosenberg invokes the traditional Jewish allegory of destruction to describe the carnage around him on the battlefield of World War 1.
THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE BABYLONIAN HORDES
They left their Babylon bare
Of all its tall men,
Of all its proud horses;
They made for Lebanon.
And the shadowy sowers went
Before their spears to sow
The fruit whose taste is ash,
For Judah's soul to know
They who bowed to the Bull god,
Whose wings roofed Babylon,
In endless hosts darkened
The bright-heavened Lebanon.
They washed their grime in pools
Where laughing girls forgot
The wiles they used for Solomon.
Sweet laughter, remembered not!
Sweet laughter charred in the flame
That clutched the cloud and earth,
While Solomon's towers crashed between
To a gird of Babylon's mirth.
Isaac Rosenberg
A man is not a follower of righteousness because he talks much learned talk; but although a man be not learned, if he forgets not the right path, if his work is rightly done, then he is a follower of righteousness
