WORLD WAR ONE REMEMBERED
ISAAC ROSENBERG (1890 - 1918)
ISAAC ROSENBERG (1890 - 1918)
Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890. Seven years later his family over to London where he attended an elementary school until he ws fourteen. At this age, he was apprenticed to an engraver and took evening classes in art at Birkbeck College. Although he began writing poetry as a boy, he wanted to make painting his career and in 1911 he was able to enter the Slade School. In 1912 he published Night and Day, the first of three pamphlets of poems, but neither these nor his paintings brought him any material success. He went to South Africa in 1914 in the hope of curing a
weakness in his lungs, but he returned to England in the following year, enlisted in the army, and was killed in action in April 1918. Gordon Bottomley edited his Collected Poems (1922), this book contains a memoir by Laurecen Binyon. The Collected Works (poetry, letters, prose pieces) were published in 1937. The editors were Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding, and there is a foreword by Siegfried Sassoon. Collected Poems was reprinted in 1949.
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| Isaac Rosenberg's self-portrait (1916) |
"God Made Blind" is one of Rosenberg's earlier pieces and is printed in preference to the better-known war poems such as the much-anthologized "Break of Day in the Trenches". It shows the effect of an enthusiastic reading of John Donne. Rosenberg's poems display an ability to conceive an idea in poetic terms and render it rhythmically, but they are often spoilt by his appetite for the extravagant and his unpleasing poetic diction. Some critics have looked on him as a poet with promise of greatness, a view we cannot wholeheartedly share; most critics are agreed that few of his actual poems are completely realized.
GOD MADE BLIND
It were a proud God-guiling, to allure
And flatter, by some cheat of ill, our Fate
To hold back the perfect crookedness its hate
Devised, and keep it poor,
And ignorant of our joy-
Masked in a giant wrong of cruel annoy,
That stands as some bleak hut to frost and night,
While hidden in bed is warmth and mad delight.
For all Love's heady valor and loved pain
Towers in our sinews that may not suppress
(Shut to God's eye) Love's springing eagerness,
And mind to advance his gain
Of gleeful secrecy
Through dolorous clay, which his eternity
Has pierced, in light that pushes out to meet
Eternity without us, heaven's heat.
Ant then, when Love's power hath increased so
That we must burst or grow to give it room,
And we can no more cheat our God with gloom,
We'll cheat Him with our joy.
For say! what can God do
To us, to Love, whom we have grown into?
Love! the poured rays of God's Eternity!
We are grown God - and shall His self-hate be?
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.
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| The poem handwritten by the poet himself |
Websites:
Bibliography:
Al-Joulan, Nayef 2007: 'Essenced to Language': The Margins of Isaac Rosenberg. Peter Lang: Bern.
Liddiard, Jean (ed.) 2004: Isaac Rosenberg: Selected Poems and Letters. Enitharmon: London.
Wiest, Aimee Jeanne 1984: The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg. University of Maryland: Maryland.
Wilson, Jean Moorcroft 2009: Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet. New York: Phoenix
In Spanish:
