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
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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The Female God
We curl into your eyes-
They drink our files and have never drained :
In the fierce forest of your hair
Our desires beat blindly for their treasure.
In your eyes' subtle pit,
Far down, glimmer our souls ;
And your hair like massive forest trees
Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb.
Like a candle lost in an electric glare
Our spirits tread your eyes' infinities :
In the wrecking waves of your tumultuous locks
Do you not hear the moaning of our pulses ?
Queen ! Goddess! Animal!
In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls ?
When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow
Do not our jealous pulses wake between ?
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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Isolation : A Fragment
My Maker shunneth me :
Even as a wretch stricken with leprosy,
So hold I pestilent supremacy.
Yea! He Instil fled far as the uttermost star,
Beyond the unperturbed fastnesses of night
And dreams that bastioned are
By fretted towers of sleep that scare His light.
Of wisdom writ, whereto
My burdened feet may haste withouten rue,
I may not spell-and I am sore to do.
Yea, all (seeing my Maker hath such dread),
Even mine own self-love, wists not but to fly
To Him, and sore besped
Leaves me, its captain, in such mutiny.
Will, deemed incorporate
With me, bath flown ere love, to expiate
Its sinful stay where He did habitate.
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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God
In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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Creation
As the pregnant womb of night
Thrills with imprisoned light,
Misty, nebulous-born,
Growing deeper into her morn,
So man, with no sudden stride,
Bloomed into pride.
In the womb of the All-spirit
The universe lay ; the will
Blind, an atom, lay still.
The pulse of matter
Obeyed in awe
And strove to flatter
The rhythmic law.
But the will grew ; nature feared,
And cast off the child she reared,
Now her rival, instinct-led,
With her own powers impregnated.
Brain and heart, blood-fervid flowers,
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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From Night And Day
IN THE WORKSHOP
Dim watery lights gleaming on gibbering faces,
Faces speechful, barren of soul and sordid,
Huddled and chewing a jest, lewd and gabbled
insidious:
Laughter, born of its dung, flashes and floods like sunlight,
Filling the room with a sense of a soul lethargic and kindly,
Touches my soul with a pathos, a hint of a wide desolation.
II
I saw the face of God to-day,
I heard the music of His smile,
And yet I was not far away,
And yet in Paradise the while.
I lay upon the sparkling grass,
And God's own mouth was kissing me,
And there was nothing that did pass
But blazed with divinity.
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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In War
Fret the nonchalant noon
With your spleen
Or your gay brow,
For the motion of your spirit
Ever moves with these.
When day shall be too quiet,
Deaf to you
And your dumb smile,
Untuned air shall lap the stillness
In the old space for your voice-
The voice that once could mirror
Remote depths
Of moving being,
Stirred by responsive voices near,
Suddenly stilled for ever.
No ghost darkens the places
Dark to One ;
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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Daughters Of War
Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs,
Their naked dances with man's spirit naked
By the root side of the tree of life
(The under side of things
And shut from earth's profoundest eyes).
I saw in prophetic gleams
These mighty daughters in their dances
Beckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpse
To mix in their glittering dances :
I heard the mighty daughters' giant sighs
In sleepless passion for the sons of valour
And envy of the days fo flesh,
Barring their love with mortal boughs across-
The mortal boughs, the mortal tree of life.
The old bark burnt with iron wars
They blow to a live flame
To char the young green clays
And reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure,
No softer lure than the savage ways of death.
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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A Ballad Of Whitechapel
God's mercy shines ;
And our full hearts must make record of this,
For grief that burst from out its dark confines
Into strange sunlit bliss.
I stood where glowed
The merry glare of golden whirring lights
Above the monstrous mass that seethed and flowed
Through one of London's nights.
1 watched the gleams
Of jagged warm lights on shrunk faces pale :
I heard mad laughter as one hears in dreams
Or Hell's harsh lurid tale.
The traffic rolled,
A gliding chaos populous of din,
A steaming wail at doom the Lord had scrawled
For perilous loads of sin.
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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Dead Man's Dump
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
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poem by Isaac Rosenberg
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