Poems by Isaac Rosenberg

POEMS BY
ISAAC ROSENBERG

SONGS IN CAPTIVITY

•/>> R. 11. Sauter
BALLAD OF THE "ROYAL ANN'

'By Croibie Garston
DOWN HERE THE HAWTHORN

•/.'; Thomas Moult

LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN

(SA/SC BOSBNB

POEMS BY
ISAAC ROSENBERG

SELECTED AND EDITED BY

GORDON BOTTOMLEY

WITH AN INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR BY

LAURENCE BINYON

1931 22

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

Youth is still childhood : when we cast off
every cloudy vesture, and our thoughts are
clear and mature ; when every act is a con-
scious thought, every thought an attempt to
arrest feeling ; our feelings strong and over-
whelming, oui sensitiveness awakened by
insignificant things in life ; when the skies
race tumultuously with our blood, and the
earth shines and laughs; when our blood
hangs suspended cd the rustling of a gown.
Our vanity loves to subdue — battle, aggressive.
How zve despise those older and duller — we
want life, newness, excitement.

(Circa 1916.)

495650

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR - - 1

tMOSES : A Play - - - 51

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH :

Daughters of War - - - 81
On Receiving the First News of the

War - - - - 84

tSpRiNG, 1916 - - - - 86

The Troop Ship - - 87

IMarching - - - - 88

Break of Day in the Trenches - 89

Killed in Action - - - 91

Returning, we hear the Larks - 92
The Destruction of Jerusalem by the

Babylonian Hordes - - 93

The Burning of the Temple - - 95

Home-Thoughts from France - - 90
vii

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH
(continued) :

The Immortals - - - - 97

Louse Hunting - - - - 98

Girl to Soldier ox Leave - - 100

Soldier : Twentieth Century - - 102

The Jew - 103

The Dying Soldier - - - 104

Dead Man's Dump - - 105

In War - - - - 109

§The Dead Heroes - - 112

FRAGMENTS OF "THE UNICORN " :

I. The Amulet - - - 117

II. The Song of Tel the Nubian - 129

III. The Tower of Skulls - - 130

EARLIER POEMS:

§ Expression - - - - 135

*From "Night and Day" - - 137

Zion - - - - HO

* Spiritual Isolation: A Fragment - 142
viii

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

EARLIER POEMS— continued :

Far Away - - - - 144

Spring - - - - - 145

Song - - ■ - - 146

* Heart's First Word. I. - - 147
t Heart's First Word. II. - - 149
*Lady, You are My God - - 150
§ If You are Fire - - - 151
Ik the Underworld - - - 152

* O, In a World of Men and Women 153
§A Girl's Thoughts - - - 154
A Ballad of Whitechapel - - 155
*Tess - - - - - 159
The Nun - - - - 160
§ In Piccadilly - - - - 161
§ A Mood - - - - 162
t First Fruit - - - - 163
A Careless Heart - - - 164
Dawn - - - - - 165
At Night - - - - 166
Creation - - - - 168
Of Any Old Man - - 170

ix

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

EARLIER POEMS— continued:

The One Lost - - - - 171
§ Wedded - - - -172

Don Juan's Song - - - 17:]

Ok a Lady Singing - - - 174

Beautj ----- 175

A Question - - - - 17()

t Chagrin - 177

The Blind God - - - 170

The Female God - - - 180

tGoD - - - 182
t Sleep - - - . -184

My Days .... 186

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The poems whose titles are marked * appeared in a
privately issued pamphlet, "Night and Day. By Isaac
Rosenberg. 1912" (pp. 24); those marked § in " Youth.
By Isaac Rosenberg. London, I. Narodiczky, Printer,
48 Mile End Road, E. 1015" (pp. 18); and those
marked f in " Moses. A Play. By Isaac Rosenberg.
London, Printed By The Paragon Printing Works,
8 Ocean Street, Stepney Green, E. 1916" (pp. ii+26).

These pamphlets were the only work issued by the
author, in addition to the following single pieces which
appeared in various periodicals :

" In the Workshop," in A Piece of Mosaic (for a Jewish
Bazaar).

"Our Dead Heroes," in South African Womenin Council,
December, 1914.

"Essay on Art," Part I, (prose), prefaced by a poem,
" Beauty," in South African Women in Council, December,
1914.

" Essay on Art," Part II., South African Women in
Council, January, 1915.

" Marching," and " Break of Day in the Trenches/' in
Poetry (Chicago), December, 1916.

xi

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG
The following pieces have appeared posthumously :
"In Piccadilly," "If You are Fire/' "Heart's First
Word, II ," " Wedded/' " I Did Not Pluck at All," in
Art nml Letters, Summer, 1919 ; with an " In Mcmoriam "
notice by Annie Rosc-nherg.

" Killed in Action," in Colour, Octoher, 1919.
" Savage Son£ " (" A Naked African " from " Moses "),
"God," in Rainbow (New York), Octoher, li>20 ; with an
" In Memoriam " notice by Horace Brodzky.

"I Mingle with Your Bones"; with an article by
Samuel Roth, in Voices, Summer, li)2L

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

I

Of the many young poets who gave their lives in
the war, Isaac Rosenberg was not the least gifted.
Adverse circumstances, imperfect education, want
of opportunity, impeded and obscured his genius ;
but whatever criticism be made of his poetry, its
faults are plainly those of excess rather than
deficiency. His writing was often difficult and
obscure, because he instinctively thought in images
and did not sufficiently appreciate the limitations
of language. Also, a continual fear of being empty
or thin led him to an over- intricate complexity.
But there was no incoherence in his mind. And
the main object of these notes, beyond recording
the facts of his life, is to illustrate the growth and
workings of his mind from his own letters, which
will be the best commentary on his poems.

I cannot precisely fix the date, but it must have
been some time in 1912, when one morning there
came to me a letter in an untidy hand from an

1 A

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

address in Whitechapel, enclosing some pages ot
verse on which criticism was asked, and signed
" Isaac Rosenberg." It was impossible not to be
struck by something unusual in the quality of the
poems. Thoughts and emotions of no common
nature struggled for expression, and at times
there gushed forth a pure song which haunted
the memory.

I answered at once, and the next day received
another letter which told me something about my
unknown correspondent. In this letter, which,
like nearly all his letters, is undated, he wrote :

" I must thank you very much for your encour-
aging reply to my poetical efforts. ... As you
are kind enough to ask about myself, I am send-
ing a sort of autobiography I wrote about a
year ago. . . . You will see from that that my
circumstances have not been very favourable for
artistic production ; but generally I am optimistic,
I suppose because I am young and do not properly
realize the difficulties. I am now attending the
Slade, being sent there by some wealthy Jews who
are kindly interested in me, and, of course, I spend
most of my time drawing. I find writing inter-
feres with drawing a good deal, and is far more
exhausting."

9

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

He went on to tell of his admirations, Rossetti
coming first for him among modern artists. He
had seen very little of early Italian art, but divined
that theirs was the type of art which he thought
the only kind worth having — " expression through
passionate colour and definite design " — not " a
moment frozen on to canvas,''1 but " the spontaneity
of un-selfconscious and childlike nature — infinity
of suggestion — that is as much part and voice of
the artist's soul as the song to the bird.11 As to
modern poets, they were " difficult to get hold of11
(their volumes being expensive), but he had an
immense admiration for Francis Thompson — "that
is the sort of poetry that appeals most to me.11 He
had done nothing yet in painting which he would
care to show. He aspired to do imaginative work,
but at present was practising portraiture, as it was
necessary to earn a living.

At my invitation Rosenberg came to see me.
Small in stature, dark, bright-eyed, thoroughly
Jewish in type, he seemed a boy with an unusual
mixture of self-reliance and modesty. Indeed, no
one could have had a more independent nature.
Obviously sensitive, he was not touchy or aggres-
sive. Possessed of vivid enthusiasms, he was shy
in speech. One found in talk how strangely little
8

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

of second-hand (in one of his age) there was in his
opinions, how fresh a mind he brought to what he
saw and read. There was an odd kind of charm
in his manner which came from his earnest, trans-
parent sincerity.

The " sort of autobiography,11 which I have
never seen since I returned it to him, and has
perhaps been destroyed, was the story of a youth,
mentally ambitious, introspective, dissatisfied with
his surroundings, consumed by secret desires for
liberation and self-expression.

The external facts of his life are briefly told.
For these I am mainly indebted to his sister, Mrs.
Wynick, whose devotion to her brother and his
work was at all times unwearied. She gave much
of a scanty leisure-time to typing copies of his
poems, and many of them would have been lost
but for her care in preserving them.

Isaac Rosenberg was born at Bristol on the 25th
of November, 1890. When he was seven he came
to London with his parents. The family settled
in the East End. The boy was sent to the Board
School of St. George's in the East, and afterwards
to the Stepney Board School. From childhood he
showed a natural gift both for drawing and for
writing. While at the Stepney school his promise
4

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

appeared so remarkable that the headmaster
allowed him to spend all his time in these pursuits.
Out of school he would draw with chalks on the
street pavement. Reading poetry was a passion
with him. At the age of fourteen he was reluc-
tantly obliged to leave school. His parents were
poor; and though they took great pride in his gifts,
he was one of a family of eight, and he must now
earn his living. He was apprenticed, therefore, to
the firm of Carl Hentschel, in Fleet Street. A
trade connected with art was chosen for him as a
stepping-stone to a painter's career, and as some-
thing to fall back upon in case his resources failed
him. But he hated trade, and felt in bondage.
In his meal-times he consoled himself by writing
poems ; in the evenings he went to classes at the
Art School of Birkbeck College. He worked hard
and won many prizes. Mr. Frank Emanuel, the
painter, who befriended and encouraged him at
this time, describes him as having been made
" bitter and despondent by his circumstances " ;
and his letters reveal fits of the deepest dejection
against which his will contended.

The uncongenial work came at last to an end.
The sense of liberation was at first intoxicating.
Yet work had to be found, and Isaac was deter-

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

mined to pursue art and nothing else. He met at
first with disappointment, and endured many pri-
vations. But before long he found good friends.
Mr. Amschewitz, an artist, and Mr. Samuels
warmly interested themselves in his behalf.
Through them he made the acquaintance of three
ladies, Mrs. Josephs, Mi's. Herbert Cohen, and
Mrs. Lowy, who undertook to provide the means
for his training at the Slade School.

Through Mr. Emanuel's friendship he had be-
come a member of "The Limners,11 a club of artists
and art teachers, which met at Mr. Emanuel's
studio. Here he had the opportunity of meeting
other artists and exchanging ideas. Prizes were
given, which young Rosenberg occasionally won.
In spite, therefore, of his poverty and unpropitious
surroundings, he had now won sympathetic friends,
and received both encouragement and material
help from discerning compatriots. But with his
sensitive artisfs pride and jealous independence
of spirit, he was not always easy to understand ;
and those who, with the sole desire to help him,
advanced his circumstances sometimes felt that
their efforts did not seem to be appreciated.
The case is not unfamiliar to readers of artists1
biographies.

6

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

Rosenberg went to the Slade School in October,
1911, and remained till March, 1914. He won
prizes at the school and praise from his teachers.
Thrown among contemporaries, all occupied with
the problems of art and the discussion of them, he
became tinged with the temper and the prevalent
ideas of his own generation of students. His
natural bent, I think, was in another direction. He
showed me drawings and studies from time to time,
and I saw a few of his paintings when they were
exhibited one summer at the Whitechapel Gallery.
He was full of ideas, was a capable draughtsman,
and could conceive an interesting design. Yet, to
judge from what I have seen of his work, it did
not seem to be for him the inevitable means of
expression. He once showed me at his studio
a large, ambitious composition — an oil-painting —
which I fancy was never completed. I cannot re-
call the nominal subject, but it was saturated with
symbolism and required a good deal of explanation.
I liked the mysteriousness of it, and the ideas which
inspired the painting had suggested figures and
groups and visionary glimpses of landscape which
had passages of real beauty, though the whole
work had grown impossibly complex with its con-
volutions of symbolic meaning. It reminded me
7

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

of his poetry ; and I think that represented his
natural bent in art. Had lie been born half a cen-
tury earlier, he would have been an ardent disciple
of Rossetti. But he could not escape from the
mental atmosphere of his own generation, in which
so "literary" a conception of painting was bound to
wither in discouragement. Later, he showed me
some studies of landscape and portrait which he
had made in South Africa. These were in a more
"modern''1 vein of realism, but they seemed to fail
in the quality of force, to which all other qualities
had been, in intention, sacrificed. They had
no personal savour. Like every generous and
ambitious youth, Rosenberg wished his own
generation to do glorious things, and wished to
belong to it as a comrade. Whether he would
have emerged and found himself as a painter is a
doubtful conjecture. I think it possible that he
would have abandoned painting. For his true
vocation was poetry, and he thought of himself as
a poet rather than as a painter.

He had begun to write verse at a very early
age. Mr. Morley Dainow, who was at the time
librarian in the Whitechapel Public Library, was
approached one day by a Jewish girl who wanted
advice and help for her young brother. His aim
8

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

in life, she said, was to be a poet. The next day
the boy was brought to the library. Isaac then
seemed to be between ten and twelve years of age.
He had already determined to be a poet and a
painter. He interested and impressed Mr. Dainow,
and in return for his friendly encouragement sent
him a poem called " David's Harp." These are
the earliest verses of Rosenberg's that Mr.
Bottomley or I have seen. They are not printed
in this book, but they are interesting because
they show how, even as a young boy, Rosenberg
cherished the traditions of his race and aspired to
become a representative poet of his own nation.
Moses and Judas Maccabaeus were intended to be
themes of his maturer poetry. " David's Harp "
is in fluent stanzas, and shows the passing influence
of Byron.

The pamphlet called " Night and Day," printed
in 1912, contains probably all that Rosenberg cared
to preserve of his early verse, though no doubt it
represented but a small selection from what he
had written.

After leaving the Slade School, he found him-
self faced with a harder struggle than ever. But
he never admitted defeat. He sold a few pictures
and got a few poems into print, but his health
9

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

was now a cause for anxiety. His lungs were
thought to be affected, and he was advised to try
a warmer climate. Having a married sister in
Cape Town, he thought of South Africa, and in
June, 1911, he sailed for the Cape. Here he
made one or two friends, painted some pictures,
taught a little, gave a few lectures, and published
some poems and articles. But the visit was not a
material success, and he returned disappointed and
despondent. Soon after his return, in 1915, he
printed a second pamphlet of verse, " Youth.1'
But he was restless and unhappy, and could not
work. It was now that he enlisted in the Army.
From this date onward he had practically no time
for painting, but he continued to write till the
end. " Moses ,1 was printed in 1 91 6. He was first
in a Bantam regiment, then in the King's Own
Royal Lancasters, and after a period of training
at Bury St. Edmunds and at Farnborough went
out, early in 1916, to France. No one could have
been less fitted for a military life. He suffered not
onlv from physical disability, bad health, and
sensitiveness, but from the absent-mindedness of
one whose imagination was possessed by his poetic
schemes. " My mind will not relinquish its
poetical yearnings,-" he wrote, " and concentration
10

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

on alien things and dull has strained my memory/1
But he endured the inhuman horror of modern
war with a great heart ; he would not have liked
to be called a hero, but his fortitude was truly
heroic. On the first of April, 1918, he was killed
in action.

II

The poems collected in this volume speak for
themselves. The obscurities, the straining and
tormenting of language in the effort to find right
expression, the immaturities of style and taste, are
apparent on the surface. The imaginative con-
ceptions and the frequent gleam of imaginative
phrasing should be equally apparent. But what
does not appear on the surface is the fine intention,
the ardent toil, and the continual self-criticism
which underlay his work. Rosenberg's aim was,
in his own words, a kind of poetry " where an
interesting complexity of thought is kept in tone
and right value to the dominating idea so that it
is understandable and still ungraspable." The
sentence occurs in one of his letters, and from
this point on I wish to let Rosenberg speak for him-
self. His letters give a picture both of his mind
and character, far more vivid than anything one
11

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

could write about him. He very rarely dated a
letter, but the address and internal evidence give
a clue to the date. The first extract is from a
letter written, while he was still an apprentice,
to Miss Winifreda Seaton, a friend to whom
Mr. Amschewitz introduced him. Miss Seaton
lent him books, encouraged him to write, discussed
art and literature with him, and criticized his
poems.

"It is horrible to think that all these hours,
when my days are full of vigour and my hands
and soul craving for self-expression, I am bound,
chained to this fiendish mangling-machine, with-
out hope and almost desire of deliverance, and the
days of youth go by. . . . I have tried to make
some sort of self-adjustment to circumstances by
saying, 'It is all experience''; but, good God! it is
all experience, and nothing else. ... I really
would like to take up painting seriously ; I think
I might do something at that ; but poetry — I
despair of ever writing excellent poetry. I can't
look at things in the simple, large way that great
poets do. My mind is so cramped and dulled and
fevered, there is no consistency of purpose, no
oneness of aim ; the very fibres are torn apart, and
V2

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

application deadened by the fiendish persistence
of the coil of circumstance."

At last the apprenticeship is over and Rosen-
berg writes* exulting :

" Congratulate me ! I've cleared out of the

shop, I hope for good and all. Fm free — free to do
anything, hang myself or anything except work.
. . . I'm very optimistic, now that I don't know
what to do, and everything seems topsy-turvy."

A little later comes the reaction :

" I am out of work. I doubt if I feel the better
for it, much as the work was distasteful, though I
expect it's the hankering thought of the conse-
quences, pecuniary, etc., that bothers me. . . .
All one's thoughts seem to revolve round to one
point — death. It is horrible, especially at night,
' in the silence of the midnight '; it seems to clutch
at your thought — you can't breathe. Oh, I think,
work, work, any work, only to stop one thinking.1''

But such moods are resisted. At another time
he is writing :

" One conceives one's lot (I suppose it's the

* Thi9 and the following extracts are from letters to the
same correspondent.

13

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

same with all people, no matter what their con-
dition) to be terribly tragic. You are the victim
of a horrible conspiracy ; everything is unfair.
The gods have either forgotten you or made you
a sort of scapegoat to bear all the punishment.
I believe, however hard one's lot is, one ought to
try and accommodate oneself to the conditions ;
and except in a case of purely physical pain, I
think it can be done. Why not make the very
utmost of our lives ? . . . Tni a practical econo-
mist in this respect. I endeavour to waste nothing.
. . . Waste words! Not to talk is to waste
words. . . .

"To most people life is a musical instrument
on which they are unable to play : but in the
musician's hands it becomes a living thing. . . .
The artist can see beauty everywhere, any-
where. . . ."

In what is perhaps an earlier letter he excuses
his neglect of serious reading by his lack of
leisure and the worries that make him crave for
amusing books as an antidote :

" You mustn't forget the circumstances I have
been brought up in, the little education I have
14

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

had. Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever
put poetry in my way. I don't think I knew
what real poetry was till I read Keats a couple of
years ago. True, I galloped through Byron when
I was about fourteen, but I fancy I read him more
for the story than for the poetry. I used to try
to imitate him. Anyway, if I didn't quite take to
Donne at first, you understand why. Poetical
appreciation is only newly bursting on me.
I always enjoyed Shelley and Keats. The
' Hyperion , lavished me. . . .

" Whenever I read anything in a great man's
life that pulls him down to me, my heart always
pleads for him, and my mind pictures extenuating
circumstances.

* * * *

" Have you ever picked up a book that looks
like a Bible on the outside, but is full of poetry
or comic within ? My Hood is like that, and, I
am afraid, so am I. Whenever I feel inclined to
laugh, my visage assumes the longitude and
gravity of a church spire.

* * # #

" I can't say I have ever experienced the power
of one spirit over another, except in books, of
15

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

course, at least in any intense way that you mean.
Unless you mean the interest one awakes in us,
and we long to know more, and none other. I
suppose we are all influenced by everybody we
come in contact with, in a subconscious way, if
not direct, and everything that happens to us is
experience ; but only the few know it. Most
people can only see and hear the noisy sunsets,
mountains and waterfalls ; but the delicate greys
and hues, the star in the puddle, the quiet sailing
cloud, is nothing to them. Of course, I only mean
this metaphorically, as distinguishing between
obvious experiences and the almost imperceptible.
I still have no work to do. I think, if nothing
turns up here, I will go to Africa. I could not
endure to live upon my people ; and up till now
I have been giving them from what I had managed
to save up when I was at work. It is nearly run
out now, and if I am to do nothing, I would
rather do it somewhere else. Besides, 1 feel so
cramped up here, I can do no drawing, reading, or
anything. . . .

" Create our own experience ! We can, but we

don't. Very often it's only the trouble of a word,

and who knows what we miss through not having

spoken? It's the man with impudence who has

16

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

more experience than anybody. He not only
varies his own, but makes other people's his own.

"Do I like music, and what music I like best?
I know nothing whatever about music. Once I
heard Schubert's ' Unfinished Symphony ' at the
band ; and — well, I was in heaven. It was a blur
of sounds — sweet, fading and blending. It seemed
to draw the sky down, the whole spirit out of me ;
it was articulate feeling. The inexpressible in
poetry, in painting, was there expressed. But I
have not heard much, and the sensation that gave
me I never had again. I should like very much
to be one of the initiated.

# * * *

" Some more confidences. I've discovered Fm
a very bad talker : I find it difficult to make myself
intelligible at times; I can't remember the exact
word I want, and I think I leave the impression
of being a rambling idiot.11

In 1910 he went to see the wonderful collection
of Japanese paintings lent by Japan to the
Exhibition at Shepherd's Bush.

" The thoroughness is astounding. No slipshod,

17 B

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

tricky slickness, trusting to chance effects, but a
subtle suggest iveness, and accident that is the
consequence of intention. "

Here are a few sentences from some " Notes
on Art":

" Life stales and dulls ; the mind demands noble
excitement, half-apprehended surmises, the eternal
desire, the beautiful. It is a vain belief that Art
and Life go hand-in-hand ; Art is, as it were,
another planet.

" Mere representation is unreal, is fragmentary.
The bone taken from Adam remains a bone. To
create is to apply pulsating rhythmic principles to
the part ; a unity, another nature, is created."

To Miss Seaton.

"Thanks so much for the Donne. I had just
been reading Ben Jonson again, and from his poem
to Donne he must have thought him a giant. I
have read some of the Donne ; I have certainly
never come across anything so choke-full of pro-
found meaningful ideas. It would have been very
difficult for him to express something common-
place, if he had to."

18

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

To Miss Seat on.
" I forgot to ask you to return my poetry, as I
mean to work on some [of the poems]. I agree the
emotions are not worth expressing, but I thought
the things had some force, and an idea or so I
rather liked. Of course, I know poetry is a far
finer thing than that, but I don't think the failure
was due to the subject — I had nothing to say
about it, that's all. Crashaw, I think, is sometimes
very sexual in his religious poems, but it is always
new and beautiful. I believe we are apt to fix a
standard (of subject) in poetry. We acknowledge
the poetry in subjects not generally taken as
material, but I think we all (at least I do) prefer
the poetical subject — " Kubla Khan," " The
Mistress of Vision," " Dream - Tryst '" ; Poe,
Verlaine. Here feeling is separated from intellect ;
our senses are not interfered with by what we know
of facts : we know infinity through melody."

After leaving the Slade School, at a loss for work
and anxious about his health, Rosenberg thought
for a time of going to Russia. But it was difficult
for a Jew to get a passport, and he reverted to
the African journey which he had contemplated
already some years before.
19

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

To Miss Seaton.
" So I've decided on Africa, the climate being
very good, and I believe plenty to do. ... I won't
be quite lost in Africa. ... I dislike London for
the selfishness it instils into one, which is a reason
of the peculiar feeling of isolation I believe most
people have in London. I hardly know anybody
whom I would regret leaving (except, of course, the
natural ties of sentiment with one's own people);
but whether it is that my nature distrusts people,
or is intolerant, or whether my pride or my back-
wardness cools people, I have always been alone.
Forgive this little excursion into the forbidden
lands of egotism."

The next letter was written to Mr. Edward
Marsh, in the midst of packing for the voyage to
the Cape. Mr. Marsh was interested in Rosenberg
both as an artist and as a poet ; he printed one of
his poems in "Georgian Poetry, 1916-1917," and
befriended him in many ways. The letter throws
light on Rosenberg's use of language in poetry. As
the piece referred to — "Midsummer Frost"1 — is not
in the present selection, it may be given here :

A July ghost, aghast at the strange winter,
Wonders, at burning noon, all summer-seeming,

20

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

How, like a sad thought huried in light [woven] words,

Winter, an alien presence, is ambushed here.

See from the fire-fountained noon there creep

Lazy vellow ardours towards pale evening,

Dragging the sun across the shell of thought ;

A web threaded with fading fire ;

Futile and fragile lure, a July ghost

Standing with feet of fire on banks of ice,

My frozen heart, the summer cannot reach —

Hidden as a root from air, or star from day,

A frozen pool whereon mirth dances,

Where the shining boys would fish.

To Edward Marsh (1914).
" I believe that all poets who are personal see
things genuinely — have their place. One needn't
be a Shakespeare and yet be quite as interesting.
I have moods when Rossetti satisfies me more than
Shakespeare, and I am sure I have enjoyed some
things of Francis Thompson more than the best of
Shakespeare. Yet I never meant to go as high as
these. I know I've come across things by people
of far inferior vision that were as important in
their results to me. I am not going to refute your
criticisms; in literature I have no judgment, at
least for style. If in reading a thought has ex-
pressed itself to me in beautiful words, my
ignorance of grammar, etc., makes me accept that.

21

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

I should think you are right mostly, and 1 may
yet work away your chief objections. You are
quite right in the way you read my poems, but I
thought I could use the ' July Ghost ' to mean the
summer, and also an ambassador of the summer,
without interfering with the sense. The ' shell of
thought' is man ; you realize a shell has an opening,
the ' ardours ' ; the sense of heat forms a web ; this
signifies a sense of summer : the web again becomes
another metaphor, a July Ghost. But, of course, I
mean it for summer right through. I think your
suggestion of taking out ' woven ' is very good.11

The next letter is from Cape Town.

To Edward Marsh (1914).
" I should like you to do me a favour if it's not
putting you to too much bother. I am in an
infernal city by the sea. This city has men in it —
and these men have souls in them — or at least
have the passages to souls. Though they are
millions of years behind time, they have yet reached
the stage of evolution that knows ears and eyes.
But these passages are dreadfully clogged up : gold
dust, diamond dust, stocks and shares, and Heaven
knows what other flinty muck. Well, I've made up

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

my mind to clear through all this rubbish, but I
want your help. Now, I'm going to give a series of
lectures on modern art (I'm sending you the first,
which I gave in great style. I was asked whether
the Futurists exhibited at the Royal Academy).
But I want to make the lectures interesting and
intelligible by reproductions or slides. Now, I
wonder whether you have reproductions which you
could lend me till I returned or was finished with
them. I want to talk about John, Cezanne, Van
Gogh, Innes, the early Picasso (not the cubistic
one), Spencer, Gertler, Lamb, Puvis de Chavannes,
Degas. A book of reproductions of the P.-
Impressionists would do, and I could get them
transferred on slides. I hope this would not put
you to any great trouble, but if you could manage
to do it you don't know how you would help me.
Stanley gave me a little job to paint two babies,
which helped me to pay my way for a bit. I
expect to get pupils and kick up a row with my
lectures. But nobody seems to have money here,
and not an ounce of interest in Art. The climate's
tine, but the Sun is a very changeable creature and
I can't come to any sort of understanding with
this golden beast. He pretends to keep quiet for
half an hour, and just as I think, ' Now I've got it,1
23

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

the damned thing has frisked about. There's a lot
of splendid stuff to paint. We are walled in by the
sharp upright mountain and the bay. Across the
bay the piled-up mountains of Africa look lovely
and dangerous. It makes one think of savagery
and earthquakes — the elemental lawlessness."

The next extract is from a letter written in
1915, just after hearing the news of Rupert
Brooke's death.

To Miss Seaton.
"Do you know Emerson's poems? I think
they are wonderful. 'Each and Air I think is
deep and beautiful. There is always a kind of
beaminess, like a dancing of light in light, in his
poems. I do think, though, that he depends too
much on inspiration ; and though they always have
a solid texture of thought, they sometimes seem
thin in colour or sensuousness.in

To Miss Seat

Oil.

" I saw Olive Schreiner last night. She's an extra-
ordinary woman — full of life. I had a little picture
for her from a dear friend of hers in Africa I stayed
with while I was there. She was so pleased with
my pictures of Kaffirs. Who is your best living
24

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

English poet ? Tve found somebody miles and
miles above everybody — a young man, Lascelles
Abercrombie — a mighty poet and brother to
Browning.11

Other references in letters show how deep at this
time Mr. Abercrombie's influence was. Rosenberg
calls his " Hymn of Love11 the finest poem of our
time.

He has now joined the Army, and writes from
Bury St. Edmunds.

To Edward Marsh (1915).
" I have just joined the Bantams, and am down
here amongst a horrible rabble. Falstaff 's scare-
crows were nothing to these. Three out of every
four have been scavengers, the fourth is a ticket-
of-leave. But that is nothing ; though while I'm
waiting for my kit I'm roughing it a bit, having
come down without even a towel. I dry myself with
my pocket-handkerchief. I don't know whether
I will be shifted as soon as I get my rig-out.1''

The next was written in hospital at Bury.

To Edward Marsh.
" First, not to alarm you by this heading, I must
tell you that while running before the Colonel I
25

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

started rather excitedly and tripped myself, coming
down pretty heavily in the wet grit, and am in
hospital with both my hands cut. I've been here
since last Saturday, and expect to be out by about
the beginning of the week. It is a dull kind of life
in the hospital, and I'm very anxious to get out and
be doing some rough kind of work. Mr. Shift' sent
me some water-colours, and I amuse myself with
drawing the other invalids. Of course, I must give
them what I do, but I can see heaps of material
for pictures here. The landscape, too, seems decent,
though I haven't seen anything but from the
barracks, as this accident happened pretty near at
the start. I hope you were not annoyed at that
fib of mine, but I never dreamt they would trouble
to find out at home. I have managed to persuade
my mother that I am for home service only,
though, of course, I have signed on for general
service. I left without saying anything because I
was afraid it would kill my mother or I would be
too weak and not go. She seems to have got over
it, though, and as soon as I can get leave I'll see
her, and I hope it will be well. It is very hard to
write here, so you must not expect interesting
letters; there is always behind or through my
object some pressing sense of foreign matter,

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

immediate and not personal, which hinders and
disjoints what would otherwise have coherence and
perhaps weight. I have left all my poems, includ-
ing a short drama, with a friend, and I will write
to him for them, when I shall send them either
direct to Abercrombie or to you first. I believe in
myself more as a poet than a painter ; I think I get
more depth into my writing. I have only taken
Donne with me, and don't feel for poetry much in
this wretched place. There is not a book or paper
here; we are not allowed to stir from the gate,
have little to eat, and are not allowed to buy any
if we have money, and are utterly wretched. (I
mean the hospital.) If you could send me some
novel or chocolates, you would make me very
happy.1"'

To Edward Marsh [from Bury St. Edmunds).

" I received a letter to-day (sent over a week
ago) from Abercrombie, and I feel very flushed
about it. He says no one who tries to write
poetry would help envying some of my writing.
Since I wrote you I have had more mishaps. My
feet now are the trouble. Do you know what
privates' military boots are ? You are given a
whole armourer's shop to wear ; but, by God ! in a
27

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

few hours my heels were all blistered, and Fve been
marching and drilling in most horrible pain. I drew
three weeks1 pay and had some money sent me
from home, and bought a pair of boots three or
four sizes too large for me, my feet had swelled so.
Besides this trouble I have a little impudent
schoolboy pup for an officer, and he has me marked ;
he has taken a dislike to me : I don't know why."

To Miss Seaton {from Bury St. Edmunds).

" Thanks for your letter and your books which
they sent me from home. It is impossible to read
as we are, and I don't expect to get proper leisure
for reading till this rotten affair is over. My feet
are pretty nigh better, and my hands, and I am
put down for a Lance-Corporal. The advantage
is, though you have a more responsible position,
you are less likely to be interfered with by the
men, and you become an authority. I expect to
be home for four days shortly. I don't know
whether I told you Lascelles Abercrombie sent me
a fine letter about my work, which made me very
bucked. There is nobody living whose praise
could have pleased me so much. I have some
pictures at the N.E.A.C, one of which is likely to
be sold.'"

28

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

To Edward Marsh {from Bury St. Edmunds).

" I suppose my troubles are really laughable,
but they do irritate at the moment. Doing coal
fatigues and cookhouse work with a torn hand, and
marching ten miles with a clean hole about an inch
round in your heel, and bullies swearing at you, is
not very natural. I think when my hands and feet
get better Til enjoy it. Nobody thinks of helping
you — I mean those who could. Not till I had
been made a thorough cripple an officer said it was
absurd to think of wearing those boots, and told
me to soak them thoroughly in oil to soften them.
Thank you for your note ; we get little enough, you
know, and I allow half of that to my mother (I
rather fancy she is going to be swindled in this
rat-trap affair), so it will do to get to London
with. You must now be the busiest man in
England, and I am sure would hardly have time to
read my things ; besides, you won't like the form-
lessness of the play. If you like you can send
them to Abercrombie, and read them when you
have more time. I don't think I told you what
he said : ' A good many of your poems strike me
as experimental and not quite certain of them-
selves. But, on the other hand, I always find a
vivid and original impulse ; and what I like most
29

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

in your songs is your ability to make the concealed
poetic power in words come Hashing out. Some
of your phrases are remarkable ; no one who tries
to write poetry would help envying some of them/
I have asked him to sit for me — a poet to paint a
poet. All this must seem to you like a blur on
the window, or hearing sounds without listening
while you are thinking.11

To Miss Section [from fflackdown Camp,
Farnborough) .
" Thanks very much for the bread and biscuits,
which I enjoyed very much. I am in another
regiment now, as the old one was smashed up on
account of most of the men being unfit. We that
were left have been transferred here. The food
is much better, but conditions are most unsettling.
Every other person is a thief, and in the end you
become one yourself, when you see all your most
essential belongings go, which you must replace
somehow. I also got into trouble here the first
day. It's not worth while detailing what happened
and exposing how ridiculous, idiotic, and meaning-
less the Army is, and its dreadful bullyisms, and
what puny minds control it. I am trying to get
our Passover off, which falls Easter. If I do I'll let
30

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

you know. The bother is that we will be on our
ball-firing then, and also this before-mentioned
affair may mess it up. This ball-firing implies we
will be ready for the front. I have been working
on ' Moses ' — in my mind, I mean — and it was
through my absent-mindedness while full of that
that I forgot certain orders, and am now under-
going a rotten and unjust punishment. Fm work-
ing a curious plot into it, and of course, as I can't
work here, I jot little scraps down and will piece
it together the first chance I get."

The remaining letters are all from France.

To Miss Seaton (1916).
" We made straight for the trenches, but we've
had vile weather, and I've been wet through for
four days and nights. I lost all my socks and
things before I left England, and hadn't the chance
to make it up again, so I've been in trouble,
particularly with bad heels ; you can't have the
slightest conception of what such an apparently
trivial thing means. We've had shells bursting
two yards off, bullets whizzing all over the show,
but all you are aware of is the agony of your
heels. ... I had a letter from R. C. Trevelyan,
31

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

the poet. ... He writes : ' It is a long time
since I have read anything that has impressed me
so much as your " Moses " and some of your short
poems. . . .' He confesses parts are difficult, and
he is not sure whether it's my fault or his.11

The next letter is the first of a series to Mr.
Bottomley, whom he was only to know by corre-
spondence. He was now for a time working with
the Salvage Corps.

To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, June 12, 1916).

" If you really mean what you say in your letter,
there is no need to tell you how proud I am. I
had to read your letter many times before I could
convince myself you were not ' pulling my leg.1
People are always telling me my work is promising
— incomprehensible, but promising, and all that
sort of thing, and my meekness subsides before the
patronizing knowingness. The first thing I

saw

of yours was last year in the Georgian Book, ' The
End of the World.1 I must have worried all
London about it — certainly everybody I know. I
had never seen anything like it. After that I got
hold of ' Chambers of Imagery.1 Mr. Marsh told
me of your plays, but I joined the Army and have
32

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

never been able to get at them. It is a great
thing to me to be able to tell you now in this
way what marvellous pleasure your work has
given me, and what pride that my work pleases
yon. I had ideas for a play called ' Adam and
Lilith 1 before I came to France, but I must wait
now.11

To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, July 23, 1916).

" Your letter came to-day with Mr. Trevelyan's,
like two friends to take me for a picnic. Or rather
like friends come to release the convict from his
chains with his innocence in their hands, as one
sees in the twopenny picture palace. You might
say, friends come to take you to church, or the
priest to the prisoner. Simple poetry, — that is
where an interesting complexity of thought is
kept in tone and right value to the dominating
idea so that it is understandable and still un-
graspable. I know it is beyond my reach just
now, except, perhaps, in bits. I am always afraid
of being empty. When I get more leisure in more
settled times I will work on a larger scale and give
myself room ; then I may be less frustrated in my
efforts to be clear, and satisfy myself too. I think
what you say about getting beauty by phrasing of
33 c

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

passages rather than the placing of individual
words very fine and very true."

To Miss Seaton {written in Hospital, 1916).
" I was very glad to have your letter and know
there is no longer a mix-up ahout letters and such-
like. Always the best thing to do is to answer at
once, that is the likeliest way of catching one, for
we shift about so quickly ; how long I will stay
here I cannot say: it may be a while or just a bit.
I have some Shakespeare : the Comedies and also
' Macbeth.'* Now I see your argument and cannot
deny my treatment of your criticisms, but have
you ever asked yourself why I always am rude to
your criticisms? Now, I intended to show you

's letters and why I value his criticisms. I

think anybody can pick holes and find unsound
parts in any work of art ; anyone can say Christ's
creed is a slave's creed, the Mosaic is a vindictive,
savage creed, and so on. It is the unique and
superior, the illuminating qualities one wants to
find — discover the direction of the impulse-
Whatever anybody thinks of a poet he will always
know himself: he knows that the most marvel-
lously expressed idea is still nothing ; and it is
stupid to think that praise can do him harm. I
34

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

know sometimes one cannot exactly define one's
feelings nor explain reasons for liking and disliking ;
but there is then the right of a suspicion that the
thing has not been properly understood or one is
prejudiced. It is much my fault if I am not
understood, I know ; but I also feel a kind of in-
justice if my idea is not grasped and is ignored,
and only petty cavilling at form, which I had
known all along was so, is continually knocked
into me. I feel quite sure that form is only a
question of time. I am afraid I am more rude
than ever, but I have exaggerated here the differ-
ence between your criticisms and 's. Ideas of

poetry can be very different too. Tennyson
thought Burns'1 love-songs important, but the
4 Cottar's S. N.1 poor. Wordsworth thought the
opposite."

To Miss Seaton {November 15, 1916 ; 'written in
Hospital) .

"London may not be the place for poetry to
keep healthy in, but Shakespeare did most of his
work there, and Donne, Keats, Milton, Blake — I
think nearly all our big poets. But, after all,
that is a matter of personal likings or otherwise.
Most of the French country I have seen has been
35

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

devastated by war, torn up — even the woods look
ghastly with their shell-shattered trees ; our only
recollections of warm and comfortable feelings are
the rare times amongst human villages, which
happened about twice in a year ; but who can tell
what one will like or do after the war? If the
twentieth century is so awful, tell me what period
you believe most enviable. Even Pater points out
the Renaissance was not an outburst — it was no
simultaneous marked impulse of minds living
in a certain period of time — but scattered and
isolated.11

To Edward Marsh {Postmark, January 30, 1917).

" I think with you that poetry should be
definite thought and clear expressions, however
subtle ; I don't think there should be any vague-
ness at all, but a sense of something hidden and
felt to be there. Now, when my things fail to be
clear, I am sure it is because of the luckless choice
of a word or the failure to introduce a word that
would flash my idea plain, as it is to my own
mind. I believe my Amazon poem to be my best
poem. If there is any difficulty, it must be in
words here and there, the changing or elimination
of which may make the poem clear. It has taken

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

me about a year to write ; for I have changed and
rechanged it and thought hard over that poem, and
striven to get that sense of inexorableness the
human (or unhuman) side of this war has. It
even penetrates behind human life ; for the
' Amazon ' who speaks in the second half of the
poem is imagined to be without her lover yet,
while all her sisters have theirs, the released spirits
of the slain earth-men ; her lover yet remains to
be released.11

To Miss Seaton (1916).
" Many thanks for book and chocolate. Both
are being devoured with equal pleasure. I can't
get quite the delight in Whitman as from one
poem of his I know — ' Captain, my Captain.1 I
admire the vigour and independence of his mind,
but his diction is so diffused. Emerson and not
Whitman is America's poet. You will persist in
refusing to see my side of our little debate on
criticism. Everybody has agreed with you about
the faults, and the reason is obvious ; the faults
are so glaring that nobody can fail to see them.
But how many have seen the beauties ? And it is
here more than the other that the true critic
shows himself. And I absolutely disagree that it
37

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

is blindness or carelessness ; it is the brain suc-
cumbing to the herculean attempt to enrich the
world of ideas."

To Laurence Binyon (1916).

" It is far, very far, to the British Museum from
here (situated as I am, Siberia is no further and
certainly no colder), but not too far for that tiny
mite of myself, my letter, to reach there. Winter
has found its way into the trenches at last, but I
will assure you, and leave to your imagination, the
transport of delight with which we welcomed its
coining. Winter is not the least of the horrors of
war. I am determined that this war, with all its
powers for devastation, shall not master my
poeting ; that is, if I am lucky enough to come
through all right. I will not leave a corner of my
consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with
the strange and extraordinary new conditions of
this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry
later on. I have thoughts of a play round our
Jewish hero, Judas Maccabeus. I have much real
material here, and also there is some parallel in
the savagery of the invaders then to this war. I
am not decided whether truth of period is a good
quality or a negative one. Flaubert's ' Salambo '
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INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

proves, perhaps, that it is good. It decides the tone
of the work, though it makes it hard to give the
human side and make it more living. However,
it is impossible now to work and difficult even to
think of poetry, one is so cramped intellectually."

To Gordon Bottomley (February, 1917).

"Your letters always give me a strange and
large pleasure ; and I shall never think I have
written poetry in vain, since it has brought your
friendliness in my way. Now, feeling as I am,
cast away and used up, you don't know what a
letter like yours is to me. Ever since November,
when we first started on our long marches, I have
felt weak ; but it seems to be some inscrutable
mysterious quality of weakness that defies all
doctors. I have been examined most thoroughly
several times by our doctor, and there seems to be
nothing at all wrong with my lungs. I believe I
have strained my abdomen in some way, and I shall
know of it later on. We have had desperate
weather, but the poor fellows in the trenches where
there are no dug-outs are the chaps to pity. I
am sending a very slight sketch of a louse-hunt.
It may be a bit vague, as I could not work it out
here, but if you can keep it till I get back I can
39

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

work on it then. I do believe I could make a
fine thing of Judas. Judas as a character is more
magnanimous than Moses, and I believe I could
make it very intense and write a lot from material
out here. Thanks very much for your joining in
with me to rout the pest out, but I have tried all
kinds of stuff; if you can think of any preparation
you believe effective Fd be most grateful for it."

The " louse hunt" refers to a night scene in which
Rosenberg took part, and which forcibly struck his
imagination as a subject for a Goya picture or for
a poem like the "Jolly Beggars": a barn full of
naked soldiers — Scottish and others — singing,
swearing, and laughing, in mad antics as they
pursued the chase.

To Gordon BottomUy {Postmark, April 8, 1917).
" All through this winter I have felt most
crotchety, all kinds of small things interfering
with my fitness. My hands would get chilblains
or bad boots would make my feet sore ; and this
aggravating a general run-down-ness, I have not
felt too happy. I have gone less warmly clad
during the winter than through the summer,
because of the increased liveliness on my clothes.
I've been stung to what we call ' dumping ' a great
40

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

part of my clothing, as I thought it wisest to go
cold than lousy. It may have been this that caused
all the crotchetiness. However, we've been in no
danger— that is, from shell- fire— for a good long
while, though so very close to most terrible
fighting. But as far as houses or sign of ordinary
human living is concerned, we might as well be in
the Sahara Desert. I think I could give some
blood-curdling touches if I wished to tell all I see,
of dead buried men blown out of their graves, and
more, but I will spare you all this."

To Edward Marsh {Postmark, May, 1917).

" Regular rhythms I do not like much, but, of
course, it depends on where the stress and accent
are laid. I think there is nothing finer than the
vigorous opening to 'Lycidas' for music; yet it is
regular. ... It is only when we get a bit of a rest
and the others might be gambling or squabbling
I do a line or two and continue this way. The
weather is gorgeous now, and we are bivouacked in
the fields."

To Edward Marsh (1917).

" I hope you have not yet got my poem, ' The
Amulet,' I've asked my sister to send you. If you
41

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

get it, please don't read it, because it's the merest
sketch and the best is yet to come. If I am able
to carry on with it, 1*11 send you it in a more
presentable fashion. I believe I have a good idea
at bottom. It's a kind of ' Rape of the Sabine
Women ' idea : some strange race of wanderers
have settled in some wild place and are perishing
out for lack of women. The prince of these
explores some country near where the women are
most fair. But the natives will not hear of foreign
marriages ; and he plots another Rape of the
Sabines, but is trapped in the act."

To Edward Marsh (1917).

" I am now fearfully rushed, but find energy
enough to scribble this in the minute I plunder
from my work. I believe I can see the obscurities
in the 'Daughters,1 but hardly hope to clear them
up in France. The first part, the picture of the
Daughters dancing and calling to the spirits of
the slain before their last ones have ceased among
the boughs of the tree of life, I must still work
on. In that part obscure the description of the
voice of the Daughter I have not made clear, I see ;
I have tried to suggest the wonderful sound of her
voice, spiritual and voluptuous at the same time-
42

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

The end is an attempt to imagine the severance of
all human relationship and the fading away of
human love. Later on I will try and work on
it, because I think it a pity if the ideas are to
be lost for want of work. My ' Unicorn , play is
stopped because of my increased toil, and I forget
how much or little I told you of it. I want to do
it in one Act, although I think I have a subject
here that could make a gigantic play. I have not
the time to write out the sketch of it as far as it's
gone, though I'd like to know your criticism of it
very much. The most difficult part I shrink from ;
I think even Shakespeare might : — the first time
Tel, the chief of the decaying race, sees a woman
(who is Lilith, Saul's wife), and he is called upon
to talk. Saul and Lilith are ordinary folk into
whose ordinary lives the Unicorn bursts. It is to
be a play of terror — terror of hidden things and
the fear of the supernatural. But I see no hope
of doing the play while out here. I have a way,
when I write, to try and put myself in the situa-
tion, and I make gestures and grimaces.'11

To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, July 20, 1917).

" My sister wrote me of your note, and it made me
very glad to feel you thought in that way about my
43

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

poem, because I liked it myself above anything I
have yet done. I know my letters are not what
they should be ; but I must take any chance I get
of writing for fear another chance does not come,
so I write hastily and leave out most I should
write about. I wished to say last time a lot about
your poem, but I could think of nothing that
would properly express my great pleasure in it ;
and I can think of nothing now. If anything, I
think it is too brief — although it is so rare and
compressed and full of hinted matter. I wish I
could get back and read your plays ; and if my
luck still continues, I shall. Leaves have com-
menced with us, but it may be a good while before
I get mine. We are more busy now than when I
last wrote, but I generally manage to knock some-
thing up if my brain means to, and I am sketching
out a little play. My great fear is that I may
lose what Eve written, which can happen here so
easily. I send home any bit I write, for safety,
but that can easily get lost in transmission.
However, I live in an immense trust that things
will turn out well."

To Gordon Bottomhy (1917).
"The other poems I have not yet read, but I will
44

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

follow on with letters and shall send the bits of
— or rather the bit of — a play I've written. Just
now it is interfered with by a punishment I am
undergoing for the offence of being endowed with
a poor memory, which continually causes me
trouble and often punishment. I forgot to wear
my gas-helmet one day ; in fact, Fve often for-
gotten it, but I was noticed one day, and seven
days1 pack drill is the consequence, which I do
between the hours of going up the line and sleep.
My memory, always weak, has become worse since
Fve been out here."

To Gordon Bottomlcy {Postmark, August 3, 1917).

" I don't think I'll get my play complete for it
in time, though it will hardly take much space,
it's so slight. If I could get home on leave I'd
work at it and get it done, no doubt, but leaves
are so chancy. It's called 'The Unicorn.' Now,
it's about a decaying race who have never seen a
woman ; animals take the place of women, but
they yearn for continuity. The chiefs Unicorn
breaks away and he goes in chase. The Unicorn is
found by boys outside a city and brought in, and
breaks away again. Saul, who has seen the Uni-
corn on his way to the city for the week's victuals,
45

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

gives chase in his cart. A storm conies on, the
mules break down, and by the lightning be sees
the Unicorn race by ; a naked black like an
apparition rises up and easily lifts the wheels from
the rut, and together thev ride to SauPs hut.
There Lilith is in great consternation, having seen
the Unicorn and knowing the legend of this race
of men. The emotion^ of the black ithe Chief)
are the really difficult part of my story. After-
wards a host of blacks on horses, like centaurs and
buffaloes, come rushing up, the Unicorn in front.
On every horse is clasped a woman. Lilith faints,
Saul stabs himself, the Chief places Lilith on the
Unicorn, and they all race away."

In the late summer of this year (1917) Rosenberg
came to England on leave.

To Gordon Bottomleij (data! September 21. 1917).

"The greatest thing of my leave after seeing
my mother was your letter which has just arrived.
... I wish I could have seen you, but now I
must go on and hope that things will turn out
well, and some happy day will give me the chance
of meeting you. ... I am afraid I can do no
writing or reading ; I feel so restless here and un-
46

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR

anchored. We have lived in such an elemental
way so long, things here don't look quite right to
me somehow ; or it may be the consciousness of
my so limited time here for freedom — so little
time to do so many things bewilders me. ' The
Unicorn,' as will be obvious, is just a basis; its
final form will be very different, I hope."1

On returning to France he was taken ill and
sent down the line. The time in hospital was a
relief, especially as his restlessness in England had
prevented writing or reading.

To Miss Section {dated February 14, 1918).
" We had a rough time in the trenches with
the mud, but now we're out for a bit of a rest,
and I will try and write longer letters. You
must know by now what a rest behind the line
means. I can call the evenings — that is, from tea
to lights out — my own ; but there is no chance
whatever for seclusion or any hope of writing
poetry now. Sometimes I give way and am ap-
palled at the devastation this life seems to have
made in my nature. It seems to have blunted
me. I seem to be powerless to compel my will to
any direction, and all I do is without energy and
interest."

47

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

To Gordon Bottomley [Postmark, February ^(i,
1918).

" I wanted to send some bits I wrote for the
'Unicorn1 while I was in hospital, and if I find
them 111 enclose them. I tried to work on your
suggestion and divided it into four acts, but since
I left the hospital all the poetry has gone quite
out of me. I seem even to forget words, and I
believe if I met anybody with ideas I'd be dumb.
No drug could be more stupefying than our work
(to me anyway), and this goes on like that old
torture of water trickling, drop by drop unendingly,
on one's helplessness.11

To Gordon Bottomley {Dated, March 7, 1918).

" I believe our interlude is nearly over, and we
may go up the line any moment now, so I answer
your letter straightaway. If only this war were
over our eyes would not be on death so much : it
seems to underlie even our underthoughts. Yet
when I have been so near to it as anybody could
be, the idea has never crossed my mind, certainly
not so much as when some lying doctor told me I
had consumption. I like to think of myself as a
poet ; so what you say, though I know it to be
extravagant, gives me immense pleasure.11
48

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR
To Miss Seaton (March 8, 1918).

" I do not feel that I have much to say, but I
do know that unless I write now it will be a long
time before you hear from me again, without
something exceptional happens. It is not very
cold now, but I dread the wet weather, which is
keeping off while we are out, and, I fear, saving
itself up for us. We will become like mummies
— look warm and lifelike, but a touch and we
crumble to pieces. Did I send you a little poem,
' The Burning of the Temple '? I thought it was
poor, or rather, difficult in expression, but G.
Bottomley thinks it fine. Was it clear to you ?
If I am lucky, and come off undamaged, I mean to
put all my innermost experiences into the 'Uni-
corn.'1 I want it to symbolize the war and all the
devastating forces let loose by an ambitious and
unscrupulous will. Last summer I wrote pieces
for it and had the whole of it planned out, but
since then I've had no chance of working on it
and it may have gone quite out of my mind."

To Edward Marsh (dated March 28, 1918).

" I think I wrote you I was about to go up the
line again after our little rest. We are now in
49 d

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

the trenches again, and though I feel very sleepy, I
just have a chance to answer your letter, so I will
while I may. It's really my being lucky enough
to bag an inch of candle that incites me to this
pitch of punctual epistolary. I must measure my
letter by the light. . . .,1

The date of the postmark on this letter is
April 2, when the writer was already dead.

LAURENCE B1NYON.

50

MOSES

A Play (1916)

PERSONS

Moses' - - -An Egyptian Pr'ince

Am xoah - - -An Overseer

Two Hebrews

Koelue - - - Abinoalis Daughter

Messenger

MOSES

Scene I. : Outside a college in Thebes. Egyptian
students pass by. Moses alone in meditation.

[Enter Messenger.]

Messenge"r
[Handing papyrus.'] Pharaoh's desires.

Moses
[Reads.'] To our beloved son, greeting. Add
to our thoughts of you, if possible to add, but a
little, and you are more than old heroes — not to
bemean your genius, who might cry " Was that
all ! ,1 We pile barriers everywhere : we give you
idiots for tools, tree stumps for swords, skin sacks
for souls. The sixteenth pyramid remains to be
built : we give you the last draft of slaves.
Move ! Forget not the edict. Pharaoh.

Moses

[To Messenger.] What is the edict ?
53

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Messenger
The royal paunch of Pharaoh dangled worriedly,
Not knowing where the wrong : viands once giant-
like
Came to him thin and thinner — what rats

gnawed ?
Honor, the swarm of slaves ! The satraps swore
Their wives' bones hurt them when they lay abed,
That before were soft and plump : the people

howled
They'd boil the slaves three days to get their fat,
Ending the famine. A haggard council held
Decrees the two hind molars, those two staunchest
Busy labourers in the belly's service, to be drawn
From out each slave's greased mouth, which soon
From incapacity will lose the habit
Of eating.

Moses

Well, should their bones stick out to find the air,
I'll make a use of them for pleasantness —
Droll demonstrations of anatomy.

Messenger

And when you've ended find 'twas one on sharks.

[Moses signs to Messenger to go.

Edit Messenger.]

54

MOSES

Moses
Fine ! Fine !
See, in my brain

What madmen have rushed through
And like a tornado
Torn up the tight roots
Of some dead universe :
The old clay is broken
For a power to soak in and knit
It all into tougher tissues
To hold life ;

Pricking my nerves till the brain might crack
It boils to my finger-tips,
Till my hands ache to grip
The hammer — the lone hammer
That breaks lives into a road
Through which my genius drives.
Pharaoh well peruked and oiled,
And your admirable pyramids,
And your interminable procession
Of crowded kings,
You are my little fishing rods
Wherewith I catch the fish
To suit my hungry belly.
I am rough now, and new, and will have no
tailor.

55

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Startlingly,

As a mountain-side

Wakes aware of its other side

When from a cave a leopard comes,

On its heels the same red sand,

Springing with acquainted air,

Sprang an intelligence

Coloured as a whim of mine,

Showed to my dull outer eyes

The living eyes underneath.

Did I not shrivel up and take the place of air,

Secret as those eyes were,

And those strong eyes call up a giant frame ?

And I am that now.

Pharaoh is sleek and deep ;

And where his love for me is set — under

The deeps, on their floor, or in the shallow

ways,
Though I have been as a diver — never yet
Could I find. ... I have a way, a touchstone !
A small misdemeanour, touch of rebelliousness ;
To prick the vein of father, monitor, foe,
Will tell which of these his kingship is.
If I shut my eyes to the edict,
And leave the pincers to rust
56

MOSES

And the slaves1 teeth as God made them,

Then hide from the summoning tribunal,

Pharaoh will speak; and I'll seize that word to
act.

Should the word be a foe's I can use it well

As a poison to soak into Egypt's bowels ;

A wraith from old Nile will cry

" For his mercy they break his back "

And I shall have a great following for this,

The rude, touched heart of the mauled, sweaty
horde,

Their rough tongues fawn at my hands, their red-
streaked eyes

Glitter with sacrifice. Well ! Pharaoh bids me
act. . . .

Hah ! Pm all a-bristle. . . . Lord, his eyes
would go wide

If he knew the road my rampant dreams would
race !

I am too much awake now — restless, so restless.

Behind white mists invisibly

My thoughts stood like a mountain ;

But Power, watching as a man,

Saw no mountain there —

Only the mixing mist and sky

And the flat earth.

57

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

What shoulder pushed through those mists
Of gay fantastic pastimes
And startled hills of sleep ?

[He looks in a mirror.]
Oh, apparition of me,
Ruddy flesh soon hueless,
Fade and show to my eyes
The lasting bare body ;
Soul-sack fall away
And show what you hold !
Sing ! Let me hear you sing.

A Voice
[Sings.]

Upon my lips, like a cloud
To burst on the peaks of light,
Sit cowled impossible things
To tie my hands at their prime and height.
Power, break through their shroud ;
Pierce them so thoroughly,
Thoroughly enter me,
Know me for one dead ;
Break the shadowy thread,
The cowering spirit's bond
Writ by illusions blond !

Ah ! Let the morning pale
58

MOSES

Throb with a wilder pulse :

No delicate flame shall quail

With terror at your convulse.

Thin branches whip the white skies

To lips and spaces of song

That chant a mood to my eyes. . . .

Ah ! Sleep can be overlong.

Moses

Voices thunder, voices ot deeds not done :

Lo, on the air are scrawled in abysmal light

Old myths never known and yet already forgone,

And songs more lost, more secret than desert light :

Martyrdoms of uncreated things,

Virgin silences waiting a breaking voice —

As in a womb they cry, in a cage beat vain wings

Under life, over life : is their unbeing my choice ?

Dull wine of torpor — the unsoldered spirit lies

limp.
Ah ! If she would run into a mould,
Some new idea unwalled
To human by-ways, an apocalyptic camp
Of utterest and ulterior dreaming,
Understood only in its gleaming,
To flash stark naked the whole girth of the world.
59

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

I am sick of priests and forms,
This rigid dry- boned refinement :
As ladies1 perfumes are
Obnoxious to stern natures,
This miasma of a rotting god
Is to me.

Who has made of the forest a park ?
Who has changed the wolf to a do<r ?
And put the horse in harness ?
And man's mind in a groove ?

I heard the one spirit cry in them,
" Break this metamorphosis,
Disenchant my lying body ;
Only putrefaction is free,
And I, Freedom, am not.
Moses ! Touch us, thou ! "

There shall not be a void or calm,
But a fury fill the veins of time —
Whose limbs had begun to rot,
Who had flattered my stupid torpor
With an easy and mimic energy,
And drained my veins with a paltry marvel
More monstrous than battle ;
For the soul ached and went out dead in
pleasure.

60

MOSES

Is not this song still sung in the streets of me ?

A naked African
Walked in the sun
Singing — singing
Of his wild love.

I slew the tiger
With your young strength
(My tawny panther)
Rolled round my life.

Three sheep, your breasts
And my head between,
Grazing together
On a smooth slope.

Ah ! Koelue !
Had you embalmed your beauty, so
It could not backward go
Or change in any way,
What were the use if on my eyes
The embalming spices were not laid
To keep us fixed,

Two amorous sculptures passioned endlessly ?
What were the use if my sight grew
And its far branches were cloud -hung,
61

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

You small at the roots like grass ;

While the new lips my spirit would kiss

Were not red lips of flesh,

But the huge kiss of power ?

Where yesterday soft hair through my fingers fell

A shaggy mane would entwine ;

And no slim form work fire to my thighs,

But human Life's inarticulate mass

Throb the pulse of a thing

Whose mountain flanks awry

Beg my mastery — mine !

Ah ! I will ride the dizzy beast of the world

My road — my way.

MOSES

Scene II. : Evening before Thebes. The Pyra-
mids are being built. Swarms of Hebrews
labouring. Priests and Taskmasters. Two
Hebrews are furtively talking. Koelue
passes by singing.

Koelue
The vague viols of evening-
Call all the flower clans
To some abysmal swinging
And tumult of deep trance ;
He may hear, flower of my singing,
And come hither winging.

Old Hebrew
[Gazing after her in a muffled frenzy.^
Hateful harlot ! Boils cover your small cruel face.
O, fine champion Moses : O, so good to us :
O, grand begetter on her of a whip and a torturer,
Her father, born to us since you kissed her.
Our champion, O so good to us !
63

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Young Hebrew
For shame! Our brothers1 twisted blood-smeared

"111 us

Tell we only have more room for wreck curtailed :
For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy
Perhaps; but they might mangle your gums
Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now ;
And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril.
Be still, old man ; wait a little.

Old Hebrew
Wait !

All day some slow dark quadruped beats
To pulp our springiness :
All day some hoofed animal treads our veins,
Leisurely — leisurely our energies flow out :
All agonies created from the first day
Have wandered hungry searching the world for us,
Or they would perish like disused Behemoth.
Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies
As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah ?

Young Hebrew

Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil
Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our
blood,

64

MOSES

Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me,

He came by and bore me into the shade :

O, what a furnace roaring in his blood

Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own

Raging through me like a strong cordial.

He spoke ! Since yesterday

Am I not larger grown ?

IVe seen men hugely shapen in soul,

Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence

They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained

sight,
And to their shop only heroes come ;
But all were cripples to this speed
Constrained to the stables of Mesh.
I say there is a famine in ripe harvest
When hungry giants come as guests :
Come knead the hills and ocean into food,
There is none for him.

The streaming vigours of his blood erupting
From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust
Out of a madman's piteous craving for
A monstrous balked perfection.

Old Hebrew

He is a prince, an animal

Not of our kind ; who perhaps has heard

65 k

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Vague rumours of our world, to his mind
An unpleasant miasma.

Young Hkbkkw
Is not Miriam his sister, Jochabed his mother ?
In the womb he looked round and saw
From furthermost stretches our wrong :
From the palaces and schools
Our pain has pierced dead generations
Back to his blood's thin source.
As we lie chained by Egyptian men
He lay in nets of their women,
And now rejoices he has broken their meshes.
O ! His desires are fleets of treasure
He has squandered, in treacherous seas.
Sailing mistrust to find frank ports ;
He fears our fear and tampers mildly
For our assent to let him save us.
When he walks amid our toil
With some master-mason
His tense brows, critical
Of the loose enginery,
Hint famed devices flat, his rod
Scratching new schemes on the sand :
But read hard the scrawled lines there —
Limned turrets and darkness, chinks of light,
66

MOSES

Half beasts snorting into the light,

A phantasmagoria, wild escapade

To our hearts' clue ; just a daring plan

To the honest mason. What swathed meanings

peer
From his work-a-day council, washed to and from
Your understanding till you doubt
That a word was said —
But a terror wakes and forces your eyes
Into his covertly, to search his searching ;
Startled to life, starved hopes slink out
Cowering, incredulous.

Old Hebrew

\_To himself.] His youth is Mattered at Moses'
kind speech to him.

\To the Young Hebrew.]
I am broken and grey, have seen much in my time,
And all this gay grotesque of childish man
Long passed ; half blind, half deaf, I only grumble
I am not blind or deaf enough for peace.
/JJiave seen splendid young fools cheat themselves
Into a prophet's frenzy ; I have seen
So many crazed shadows puffed away,
And conscious cheats with such an ache for fame
67

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

They'd make a bonfire of themselves to be
Mouthed in the squares, broad in the public eye^J
And whose backs break, whose lives are mauled,

after
It all falls Hat? His tender airs chill me —
As thoughts of sleep to a man tiptoed night-long
Roped round his neck, for sleep means death to

him.
Oh, he is kind to us !

Your safe teeth chatter when they hear a step :
He left them yours because his cunning way
Would brag the wrong against his humane act
By Pharaoh ; so gain more favour than he lost.

Youxc; Hebrew

Help him not then, and push your safety away :
I for my part will be his backward eye,
His hands when they are shut. Ah ! Abinoah !
Like a bad smell from the soul of Moses dipt
In the mire of lust he hangs round him ;
And if his slit-like eyes could tear right out
The pleasure Moses on his daughter had,
She'd be as virgin as ere she came nestling
Into that fierce unmanageable blood,
Flying from her loathed father. O, that slave
Has hammered from the anvil of her beauty
68

MOSES

A steel to break his manacles : hard for us
Moses has made him overseer. O, his slits
Pry — pry. . . . For what ? . . . To sell to Imra. . . .

[Aisinoah is seen approaching:]

Sh ! The thin-lipped abomination !
Zig-zagging haschish tours in a fine style :
It were delightful labour making bricks,
Knowing they would kiss friendly with his head.

Abixoah

[ Who has been taking haschish ; and who has one
obsession, hatred of Jews.]

Dirt-draggled mongrels, circumcised slaves,
You puddle with your lousy gibberish
The holy air, Pharaoh's own tributary :
Filthy manure for Pharaoh's flourishing,
I'll circumcise and make holy your tongues,
And stop one outlet to your profanation.

[To the Old Hebrew.]

IVe never seen one beg so for a blow ;
Too soft am I to resist such entreaty.

[Beats him.]
Your howling holds the earnest energies
You cheat from Pharaoh when you make his bricks.
69

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

An Aged Minstrel

[Swigs frorn a distance^

Taut is the air and tied the trees,
The leaves lie as on a hand ;
God's unthinkable imagination
Invents new tortures for nature.

And when the air is soft and the leaves
Feel free and push and tremble,
Will they not remember and say
How wonderful to have lived ?

[The Old Hebrew is agitated and murmurs^]

Messiah, Messiah. . . . That voice . . .
O, he has beaten my sight out. ... I see
Like a rain about a devouring fire. . . .

[The Minstrel sings.']

Ye who best God awhile, O hear : your wealth
Is but His cunning to see 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.
70

MOSES

Old Hebrew

I am crazed with whips. ... I hear a Messiah.

Young Hebrew
The venerable man will question this.

Abinoah
[Overhearing.] Ill beat you more, and he'll

question
The scratchiness of your whining ; or, may be,
Thence ma}7 be born deep argument
With reasons from philosophy,
That this blow, taking longer, yet was but one,
Or perhaps two ; or that you felt this one —
Arguing from the difference in your whine —
Exactly, or not, like the other.

Minstrel
You labour hard to give pain.

Abinoah
[Still beating.] My pain is . . . not ... to
labour so.

Minstrel
What is this greybeard worth to you now,
All his dried-up blood crumbled to dust?
71

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

[Motions Abinoah to desist, but not in time to pre-
vent the old man fainting into the hands of
the Young Hebrew.]

A BTNOAfl

Harper, are you envious of the old fool ?

Go ! Hug the rat who stole your last crumbs,

And gnawed the hole in your life which made

time wonder
"Who it was saved labour for him the next score of

years.
We allowed them life for their labour — they

haggled.
Food they must have, and (god of laughter!) even

ease ;
But mud and lice and Jews are very busy
Breeding plagues in ease.

\_Thc Minstrel pulls his beard and robe off.~]

Abinoah

Moses !

Moses
You drunken rascal !

Abinoah

A drunken rascal ! Isis, hear the Prince !
Drunken with duty, and he calls me rascal.
72

MOSES

Moses

You may think it your duty to get drunk ;
But get yourself bronze claws before
You would be impudent.

Abinoah

When a mans drunk he'll kiss a horse or king,

He's so affectionate. Under your words

There is strong wine to make me drunk ; you

think,
The lines of all your face say, " Her father,

Koelue's father. "

Moses

This is too droll and extraordinary.

I dreamt I was a prince — a queer droll dream

Where a certain slave of mine, a thing, a toad,

Shifting his belly, showed a diamond

Where he had lain ; and a blind dumb messenger

Bore syllabled messages soaked right through

with glee :
I paid the toad, the blind man ; afterwards
They spread a stench and snarling. O, droll

dream !

73

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

I think you merely mean to flatter me,

You subtle knave, that, more than prince, I'm man

And worth to listen to your bawdy breath.

Abinoah

Yet my breath was worth your mixing with.

Moses
A boy at college flattered so by a girl
Will give her what she asks for.

Abtxoah

Osiris ! Burning Osiris !

Of thee desirable, for thee, her hair. . . .

[He looks inanely at Moses, saying to himself.]
Prince Imra vowed his honey-hives and vineyards:
Isis, to let a Jew have her for nothing !
[He sings under his breath.]

Night by night in a little house
A man and woman meet ;
They look like each other,
They are sister and brother ;
And night by night at that same hour
A king calls for his son in vain.
74

MOSES

Moses

[To himself.] So, sister Miriam, it is known

then. Slave, you die.
[Aloud.] O, you ambiguous stench,
You'll be more interesting as a mummy
I have no doubt.

Abinoah

Fin drunk, yes — drenched with the thought

Of a certain thing. [Aside.'] I'll sleep sounder

to-night
Than all the nights I've followed him about
Worrying each slight clue, each monosyllable
To give the word to Imra : the prince is near,
And Moses' eyes shall blink before next hour
To a hundred javelins. Til tease him till they

come.
[Aloud.] On Koelue's tears I swam to you, in a mist
Of her sighs I hung round you ;
As in some hallucination I've been walking
A white waste world, we two only in it.

Moses

Doubtless the instinct balked to bully the girl,
Making large gapings in your haschish dreams,
75

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Led you to me in whom she was thoroughly lost.
Pah, you sicken me !

\_Hc is silent awhile, then turns away. \

Abinoah
Prince Imra is Pharaoh's choice now, and Koelue's.

[Moses turns back- menacingly. \

Moses
Silence, you beast !

\_He changes his tone to a winning softness. \

I hate these family quarrels : it is so

Like fratricide. I am a rebel, well ?

Soft ! You are not, and we are knit so close

It would be shame for a son to be so honoured

And the father still unknown : come, Koelue's (so

my) father,
I'll tell my plans — you'll beg to be rebel then.
Look round on the night —
Old as the first, bleak, even her wish is done ;
She has never seen, though dreamt perhaps of

the sun,
Yet only dawn divides ; could a miracle
76

MOSES

Destroy the dawn, night would be mixed with

light,
No night or light would be, but a new thing :
So with these slaves, who perhaps have dreamt of

freedom,
Egypt was in the way ; I'll strike it out
With my ways curious and unusual.
I have a trouble in my mind for largeness,
Rough-hearted, shaggy, which your grave ardours

lack :
Here is the quarry quiet for me to hew ;
Here are the springs, primeval elements,
The roots1 hid secrecy, old source of race,
Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct.
I'd shape one impulse through the contraries
Of vain ambitious men, selfish and callous,
And frail life -drifters, reticent, delicate —
Litheness thread bulk, a nation's harmony :
These are not lame nor bent awry, but placeless
With the rust and stagnant. All that's low I'll

charm,
Barbaric love sweeten to tenderness,
Cunning ran into wisdom, craft turn to skill ;
Their meanness, threaded right and sensibly,
Change to a prudence envied and not sneered ;
Their hugeness be a driving wedge to a thing
77

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Ineffable and useable, as near

Solidity as human life can be :

So grandly fashion these rude elements

Into some newer nature, a consciousness

Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul,

Oppressing with its gorgeous tyranny

CTntil they take it thus — or die.

{While .speaking, he places his hand on the unsus-
pecting Egyptian's head and gently, caress-
ingly, pulls his hair back until his chin is
above his forehead, and holds him so till he is
suffocated. In the darkness ahead is seen the
glimmer of javelins and spears : it is Prince
Intra s cohorts come to arrest Moses.]

The End.

78

POEMS FROM CAMP AND
TRENCH

And like the artist who creates

From dying things what never dies. . . .

Fragment.

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

DAUGHTERS OF AVAR

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 daughters1 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 days
And reach the occult soul ; they have no softer lure,
No s ofter lure than the savage ways of death.
81 F

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

We were satisfied of our lords the moon and the sun
To take our wage of sleep and bread and warmth —
These maidens came — these strong ever-living

Amazons,
And in an easy might their wrists
Of night's sway and noon's sway the sceptres brake,
Clouding the wild, the soft lustres of our eyes.

Clouding the wild lustres, the clinging tender lights ;

Driving the darkness into the flame of day

With the Amazonian wind of them

Over our corroding faces

That must be broken — broken for evermore,

So the soul can leap out

Into their huge embraces.

Though there are human faces

Best sculptures of Deity,

And sinews lusted after

By the Archangels tall,

Even these must leap to the love-heat of these

maidens
From the flame of terrene days,
Leaving grey ashes to the wind — to the wind.

One (whose great lifted face,
Where wisdom's strength and beauty's strength
82

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

And the thewed strength of large beasts

Moved and merged, gloomed and lit)

Was speaking, surely, as the earth- men's earth fell

away ;
Whose new hearing drank the sound
Where pictures, lutes, and mountains mixed
With the loosed spirit of a thought,
Essenced to language thus —

" My sisters force their males

From the doomed earth, from the doomed glee

And hankering of hearts.

Frail hands gleam up through the human quag-
mire, and lips of ash

Seem to wail, as in sad faded paintings

Far-sunken and strange.

My sisters have their males

Clean of the dust of old days

That clings about those white hands

And yearns in those voices sad :

But these shall not see them,

Or think of them in any days or years ;

They are my sisters' lovers in other days and
years."

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

ON RECEIVING THE FIRST NEWS OF
THE WAR

Snow is a strange white word ;
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter's cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know ;
No man knows why.

In all men's hearts it is :
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face,
God's blood is shed :
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.
84

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

O ancient crimson curse !
Corrode, consume ;
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.

Cape Town, 1914.

85

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

SPRING, 1916

Slow, rigid, is this masquerade

That passes as through a difficult air :

Heavily — heavily passes.

What lias she fed on ? Who her table laid

Through the three seasons ? What forbidden fare

Ruined her as a mortal lass is ?

I played with her two years ago,

Who might be now her own sister in stone ;

So altered from her May mien,

When round the pink a necklace of warm snow

Laughed to her throat where my mouth's touch

had gone.
How is this, ruined Queen ?

Who lured her vivid beauty so

To be that strained chill thing that moves

So ghastly midst her young brood

Of pregnant shoots that she for men did grow ?

AVhere are the strong men who made these their

loves ?
Spring ! God pity your mood !

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

THE TROOP SHIP

Grotesque and queerly huddled

Contortionists to twist

The sleepy soul to a sleep,

We lie all sorts of ways

And cannot sleep.

The wet wind is so cold.

And the lurching men so careless,

That, should you drop to a doze,

Winds1 fumble or men's feet

Are on your face.

87

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

MARCHING

(as seek from the left file).

My eyes catch ruddy necks
Sturdily pressed back —
All a red-brick moving glint.
Like flaming pendulums, hands
Swing across the khaki —
Mustard-coloured khaki —
To the automatic feet.

We husband the ancient glory
In these bared necks and hands.
Not broke is the forge of Mars ;
But a subtler brain beats iron
To shoe the hoofs of death
(Who paws dynamic air now).
Blind fingers loose an iron cloud
To rain immortal darkness
On strong eyes.

88

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

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
(And God knows what antipathies).
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.
89

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

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.

90

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

KILLED IN ACTION

Your " Youth "* has fallen from its shelf,

And you have fallen, you yourself.

They knocked a soldier on the head,

I mourn the poet who fell dead.

And yet I think it was by chance,

By oversight you died in France.

You were so poor an outward man,

So small against your spirit's span,

That Nature, being tired awhile,

Saw but your outward human pile ;

And Nature, who would never let

A sun with light still in it set,

Before you even reached your sky,

In inadvertence let you die.

* " Youth," a volume of poems by I. Rosenberg.

9 J

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS

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 listening 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.

92

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

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 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 !
93

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

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.

94

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

THE BURNING OF THE TEMPLE

Fierce wrath of Solomon,
Where sleepest thou ? O see,
The fabric which thou won
Earth and ocean to give thee —
O look at the red skies.

Or hath the sun plunged down ?

What is this molten gold —

These thundering fires blown

Through heaven, where the smoke rolled ?

Again the great king dies.

His dreams go out in smoke.
His days he let not pass
And sculptured here are broke,
Are charred as the burnt grass,
Gone as his mouth's last sighs.

95

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

HOME-THOUGHTS FROM FRANCE

Wan, fragile faces of joy,
Pitiful mouths that strive
To light with smiles the place
We dream we walk alive,

To you I stretch my hands,
Hands shut in pitiless trance
In a land of ruin and woe,
The desolate land of France.

Dear faces startled and shaken,
Out of wild dust and sounds
You yearn to me, lure and sadden
My heart with futile bounds.

96

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

THE IMMORTALS

1 killed them, but they would not die.
Yea, all the day and all the night
For them I could not rest nor sleep,
Nor guard from them nor hide in flight !

Then in my agony I turned
And made my hands red in their gore.
In vain — for faster than I slew
They rose more cruel than before.

I killed and killed with slaughter mad ;
I killed till all my strength was gone ;
And still they rose to torture me,
For Devils only die for fun.

I used to think the Devil hid

In women's smiles and wine's carouse ;

I called him Satan, Balzebub ;

But now I call him dirty louse.

97

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

LOUSE HUNTING

Nudes, stark and glistening,

Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces

And raging limbs

Whirl over the floor one fire ;

For a shirt verminously busy

Yon soldier tore from his throat

With oaths

Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice,

And soon the shirt was aflare

Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons' pantomime
This plunge was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the gibbering shadows
Mixed with the baffled arms on the wall.
OS

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

See Gargantuan hooked fingers

Pluck in supreme flesh

To smutch supreme littleness.

See the merry limbs in that Highland fling

Because some wizard vermin willed

To charm from the quiet this revel

When our ears were half lulled

By the dark music

Blown from Sleep's trumpet.

99

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

GIRL TO SOLDIER ON LEAVE

I love you, Titan lover,
My own storm-days-' Titan.
Greater than the son of Zeus,
I know whom I would choose.

Titan — my splendid rebel —

The old Prometheus

Wanes like a ghost before your power

His pangs were joys to yours.

Pallid days, arid and wan,
Tied your soul fast :
Babel-cities' smoky tops
Pressed upon your growth

Weary gyves. What were you
But a word in the brain's ways,
Or the sleep of Circe's swine ?
One gyve holds you yet.
100

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

It held you hiddenly on the Somme
Tied from my heart at home :

0 must it loosen now ? I wish

You were bound with the old, old gyves.

Love ! You love me — your eyes
Have looked through death at mine.
You have tempted a grave too much.

1 let you — I repine.

101

POEMS .T. [SAAC ROSENBERG

SOLDIER : TWENTIETH CENTURY

I love you, great new Titan !
Ami not you ?
Napoleon and Caesar
Out of you grew.

Out of unthinkable torture,
Eyes kissed by death,
Won back to the world again,
Lost and won in a breath,

Cruel men are made immortal.

Out of your pain born,

They have stolen the sun's power

With their feet on your shoulders worn.

Let them shrink from your girth,
That has outgrown the pallid days
When you slept like Circe's swine
Or a word in the brain's ways.

102

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

THE JEW

Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
Lit by a lamp in his blood
Ten immutable rules, a moon
For mutable lampless men.

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy.
With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses .
Then why do they sneer at me ?

103

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

THE DYING SOLDIER

" Here are houses," he moaned,
" I could reach, but my brain swims.'1
Then they thundered and flashed,
And shook the earth to its rims.

" They are gunpits,11 he gasped,

" Our men are at the guns.

Water ! . . . Water ! . . . Oh, water !

For one of England's dying sons.11

" We cannot give you water,
Were all England in your breath.11
" Water ! . . . Water ! . . . Oh, water
He moaned and swooned to death.

104

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

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 :
105

POEMS BY ISAA( ROSENBERG

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 souls' sack,

Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.

Who hurled them out ? Who hurled ?

None saw their spirits1 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.
106

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

The air is loud with death,

The dark air spurts with fire,

The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,

These 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.

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.
107

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

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.

I OS

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

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.

109

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

No ghost darkens the places

Dark to One ;

But my eyes dream,

And my heart is heavy to think

How it was heavy once.

In the old days when death

Stalked the world

For the flower of men,

And the rose of beauty faded

And pined in the great gloom,

One day we dug a grave :

We were vexed

With the sun's heat.

We scanned the hooded dead :

At noon we sat and talked.

How death had kissed their eyes
Three dread noons since,
How human art won
The dark soul to flicker
Till it was lost again :

And we whom chance kept whole —
But haggard,

110

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

Spent — were charged

To make a place for them who knew

No pain in any place.

The good priest came to pray ;

Our ears half heard,

And half we thought

Of alien things, irrelevant ;

And the heat and thirst were great.

The good priest read : " I heard . . .,1

Dimly my brain

Held words and lost. . . .

Sudden my blood ran cold. . . .

God ! God ! It could not be.

He read my brother's name ;

I sank —

I clutched the priest.

They did not tell me it was he

Was killed three days ago.

What are the great sceptred dooms
To us, caught
In the wild wave ?
We break ourselves on them,
My brother, our hearts and years.
Ill

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

THE DEAD HEROES

Flame out, you glorious skies,
AVelcome our brave ;
Kiss their exultant eyes ;
Give what they gave.

Flash, mailed seraphim,
Your burning spears ;
New days to outflame their dim
Heroic years.

Thrills their baptismal tread
The bright proud air ;
The embattled plumes outspread
Burn upwards there.

Flame out, flame out, O Song !
Star ring to star ;
Strong as our hurt is strong
Our children are.

112

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

Their blood is England's heart ;
By their dead hands
It is their noble part
That England stands.

England — Time gave them thee ;
They gave back this
To win Eternity
And claim God's kiss.

113

FRAGMENTS OF -THE
UNICORN "

FRAGMENTS OF " THE
UNICORN"

I
THE AMULET

Lilith. Saul. Amak. Nubian.

Lilitii sits under pomegranate trees watching her
child Amak playing with Saul his father's
helm and spear. A light smoke is ascending
from the chimney of their hut, and through the
doorway a naked Nubian man is seen stirring
the embers. Saul sleeps.

Lilith

Amak, you'll break your father's sleep :
Come here and tell me what those spices are
This strange man bakes our cakes with.
It makes the brain wild. Be still, Amak :
I'll give you the strange man your father brought,
And he will run with you upon his back to-day.
117

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Come from your father or you'll get no cake ;

He's been a long journey.

Bring me the pictured book he brought for you.

What ! Already cut to pieces ?

Put away that horn from your father's ear,

And stay that horrid noise : come, Amak.

\A<mdk runs to his mother with a jade amulet,
shoutmgS]

Amak
Look, mother, what I've found.

[He runs had- again, making great shouts.]

LlLlTH

It dances with my blood : when my eyes caught it

first
I was like lost, and yearned and yearned and

yearned,
And strained like iron to stay my head from falling
Upon that beggar's breast where the jade stone

hung.
Perhaps the spirit of Saul's young love lies here
Strayed far and brought back by this stranger near.
Saul said his discourse was more deep than

Heaven.

118

FRAGMENTS OF "THE UNICORN"

For the storm trapped him ere he left the town
Loaded with our week's victuals : the slime clung
And licked and clawed and chewed the clogged

dragging wheels
Till they sunk right to the axle : Saul, sodden and

vexed,
Like fury smote the mules' mouths, pulling but

sweat
From his drowned hair and theirs, while the

thunder knocked
And all the air yawned water, falling water,
And the light cart was water, like a wrecked raft,
And all seemed like a forest under the ocean.
Sudden the lightning flashed upon a figure
Moving as a man moves in the slipping mud,
Singing, but not as a man sings, through the

storm,
Which could not drown his sounds. Saul bawled

" Hi ! Hi ! "
And the man loomed, naked, vast, and gripped

the wheels ;
Saul fiercely dug from under; he tugged the

wheels ;
The mules foamed straining, straining.
Suddenly they went.

Saul and the man leaped in : Saul, miserably sodden,
119

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Marvelled at the Large cheer in a naked glistening

man ;
Yet soon fell in with that contented mood,
That when our hut's light broke on his new mind
lie could not credit it — too soon it seemed :
The stranger man's talk was witchery.
I pray his baking be as magical ;
The cakes should be nigh burnt.

[She calls the Nubian. He answers from within.']

Nubian

They are laid by to cool, housewife.

Lilith

Bring me the sherbet from the ledge and the fast-
dried figs.

[The Nubian brings sherbet, figs, and a bowl of ice,
and lays them down.']

[She looks curiously at him. He is an immense
man with squat, mule-shinned features : his Jet-
black curled beard, crisp hair, glistening nude
limbs, appear to her like some heathen idol of
ancient stories.]

1520

FRAGMENTS OF "THE UNICORN"

[She thinks to herself.']

Out of the lightning

In a dizzying cloven wink

This apparition stood up,

Of stricken trunk or beast's spirit,

Stirred by Saul's blasphemies ;

So Saul's heart feared, aghast.

But lo, he touched the mischance and life ran

straight !
Was it the storm-spirit, storm's pilot,
With all the heaving debris of Noah's sunken days
Dragged on his loins ;
Law's spirit wandering to us
Through Nature's anarchy,
Wandering towards us when the Titans yet were

young ?
Perhaps Moses and Buddha he met.

[She speeds aloud.]

The shadow of these pomegranate boughs

Is sweet and restful ; sit and ease your feet. Eat

of these figs ;
You have journeyed long.

Nubian
All my life, housewife.

121

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSEN HERG

ElI.ITH

You have *een men and women,

Soaked yourself in powers and old glories,

In broken days and tears and glees,

And touched cold hands —

Hands shut in pitiless trances where the feast is

high.
I think there is more sorrow in the world
Than man can bear.

Nubian

None can exceed their limit, lady :
You either bear or break.

Li l rrn

Can one choose to break P To bear,
Wearily to bear, is misery.
Beauty is this corroding malady.

Nubian

Beauty is a great paradox —
Music's secret soul creeping about the senses
To wrestle with man's coarser nature.
It is hard when beauty loses.
122

FRAGMENTS OF "THE UNICORN"

LlLITH

I think beauty is a bad bargain made of life.

Men's iron sinews hew them room in the world

And use deceits to gain them trophies :

O, when our beauty fails us did we not use

Deceits, where were our room in the world —

Only our room in the world ?

Are not the songs and devices of men

Moulds they have made after my scarlet mouth,

Of cunning words and contours of bronze

And viols and gathered air ?

They without song have sung me

Boldly and shamelessly.

I am no wanton, no harlot ;

I have been pleased and smiled my pleasure,

I am a wife with a woman's natural ways.

Yet through the shadow of the pomegranates

Filters a poison day by day,

And to a malady turns

The blond, the ample music of my heart :

Inward to eat my heart

My thoughts are worms that suck my softness all

away.
I watch the dumb eyeless hours
Drop their tears, then shapeless moaning drop.
123

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Unfathomable is my mouth's dream

Do not men say ?

So secret are my far eyes,

"Weaving for iron men profound subtleties.

Sorceress they name me ;
And my eyes harden, and they say,
" How may those eyes know love
If God made her without a heart?

" Her tears, her moaning,

Her sad profound gaze,

The dishevelled lustres of her hair

Moon-storm like"1'' they say,

" These are her subtleties ,1 men say.

My husband sleeps,

The ghosts of my virgin days do not trouble him

His sleep can be over-long,

For there is that in my embers

Pride and blushes of fire, the outraged blood,

His sleep makes me remember.

Sleep, hairy hunter ; sleep !
You are not hungry more,
Having fed on my deliciousness ;
Your sleep is not adultery to me,
124

FRAGMENTS OF "THE UNICORN"

For you were wed to a girl

And I am a woman.

My lonely days are not whips to my honour.

[She dries her tears zvith her hair, then fingers the
amulet at her throat.]

Yours, friend.

Nubian

[Eagerly.] My amulet ! My amulet !

[He speaks gravely.] Small comfort is counsel to

broken lives ;
But tolerance is medicinal.
In all our textures are loosed
Pulses straining against strictness
Because an easy issue lies therefrom.
(Could they but slink past the hands holding whips
To hunt them from the human pale
Where is the accident to cover ? Spite fears bias.)
I am justified at my heart's plea ;
He is justified also.

For the eyes of vanity are sleepless — are suspicious.
Are mad with imaginings
Of secret stabs in words, in looks, in gestures.
125

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Man is a chimera's eremite,

That lures him from the good kindness of days

Which only ask his willingness.

There is a crazed shadow from no golden body

That poisons at the core

What smiles may stray :

It mixes with all God-ancest railed essences,

And twists the brain and heart.

This shadow sits in the texture of Saul's being,

Mauling your love and beauty with its lies:

I hold a power like light to shrivel it —

There, in your throat's hollow — that green jade.

[He snatches at it as she lets it fall. He grows
white and troubled, and walks to where A.mak is
playing, and sees minutely strewn pieces of paper.]

[He mutters.'] Lost — lost.

The child has torn the scroll in it,

And half is away. It cannot be spelt now.

Lilith

God, restore me his love.
Ah! Well!

[She rises."]

126

FRAGMENTS OF " THE UNICORN "

I will go now ; prepare our evening meal ;
And waken my husband, my love once.

Nubian

[Musing.] The lightning of the heavens

Lifts an apocalypse :

The dumb night's lips are scared and wide,

The world is reeling with sound :

Was I deaf before, mute, tied ?

What shakes here from lustre-seeded pomegranates

Not in the great world,

More vast and terrible ?

What is this ecstasy in form,

This lightning

That found the lightning in my blood,

Searing my spirit's lips aghast and naked ?

I am flung in the abyss of days,

And the void is rilled with rushing sound

From pent eternities :

I am strewn as the cypher is strewn.

A woman — a soft woman !

Our girls have hair

Like heights of night ringing with never-seen larks,

Or blindness dim with dreams :

Here is a yellow tiger gay that blinds your night,

Mane — Mane — Mane !

127

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Your honey spilt round that small dazzling face

Shakes me to golden tremors ;

I have no life at all,

Only thin golden tremors.

Light tender beast !

Your fragile gleaming wrists

Have shaken the scaled glacier from under me,

And bored into my craft

That is now with the old dreamy Adam

With other things of dust.

LlLlTH

You lazy hound ! See my poor child.

[He turns to see Lilith drop the bowl and cakes and
run to A.mak — who is crying, half stifled under
Saul's huge shield.]

[Saul opens his eyes.~\

128

FRAGMENTS OF "THE UNICORN

II
THE SONG OF TEL THE NUBIAN

Small dazzling face !
I shut you in my soul ;
How can I perish now ?

But thence a strange decay —

Your fragile gleaming wrists

Waver my days and shake my life

To golden tremors. I have no life at all,

Only thin golden tremors

That shudder over the abyss of days

Which hedged my spirit, my spirit your prison

walls
That shrunk like phantasms with your vivid

beauty —

Towering and widening till
The sad moonless place
Throngs with a million torches
And spears of flaming wings.

129 i

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

III
THE TOWER OF SKULLS

Mourners

These layers of piled-up skulls,
These layers of gleaming' horror — stark horror !
Ah me ! Through my thin hands they touch my
eyes.

Everywhere, everywhere is a pregnant birth,

And here in death's land is a pregnant birth.

Your own crying is less mortal

Than the amazing soul in your body.

Your own crying yon parrot takes up

And from your empty skull cries it afterwards.

Thou whose dark activities unenchanted

Days from gyrating days, suspending them

To thrust them far from sight, from the gyrating

days
Which have gone widening on and left us here,
Cast derelicts lost for ever.
1530

FRAGMENTS OF " THE UNICORN "

When aged flesh looks down on tender brood
For he knows betvveeu his thin ribs1 walls
The giant universe, the interminable
Panorama — synods, myths and creeds,
He knows his dust is fire and seed.

131

EARLIER POEMS

J have heard the Gods
In their high conference
As I lay outside the world
Quiet in sleep. . . .

Fragment.

He was an artist and a dreamer — that is, one whose
delight in the beauty of life was an effective obstacle to
the achievement of the joy of living.

(Circa 1913.)

EARLIER POEMS

EXPRESSION

Call — call — and bruise the air :

Shatter dumb space !

Yea ! We will fling this passion everywhere ;

Leaving no place

For the superb and grave

Magnificent throng,

The pregnant queens of quietness that brave

And edge our song

Of wonder at the light

(Our life-leased home),

Of greeting to our housemates. And in might

Our song shall roam

Life's heart, a blossoming fire

Blown bright by thought,

While gleams and fades the infinite desire,

Phantasmed naught.

135

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Can this be caught and caged ?

Wings can be dipt

Of eagles, the sun's gaudy measure gauged,

But no sense dipt

In the mystery of sense :

The troubled throng

Of words break out like smothered fire through

dense
And smouldering wrong.

13()

EARLIER POEMS

FROM " NIGHT AND DAY "

I
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.
137

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

I lay upon the sparkling grass,
And God's own mouth was kissing me,
And there was nothing that did pass
Rut blazed with divinity.

Divine — divine — upon my eyes,
Upon mine hair — divine — divine,
The fervour of the golden skies,
The ardent gaze of God on mine.

Ill

Then spake I to the tree,
" Were ye your own desire
What is it ye would be P11

Answered the tree to me,
" I am my own desire,
I am what I would be.

" If you were your desire
Would you lie under me,
And see me as you see ? "

" I am my own desire
While I lie under you,
And that which I would be
Desire will sing to you.''1

138

EARLIER POEMS
IV

I wander — I wander — O will she wander here
Where'er my footsteps carry me I know that she

is near,
A jewelled lamp within her hand and jewels in

her hair ;
I lost her in a vision once and seek her everywhere.

My spirit whispers she is near, I look at you and

you:
Surely she has not passed me, I sleeping as she flew.
I wander — I wander, and yet she is not here,
Although my spirit whispers to me that she is

near.

139

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

ZION *

She stood — a hill-ensceptred Queen,
The glory streaming from her ;

While Heaven flashed her rays between,
And shed eternal summer.

The gates of morning opened wide

On sunny dome and steeple ;
Noon gleamed upon the mountain-side

Thronged with a happy people ;

And twilight's drowsy, half closed eyes

Beheld that virgin splendour
Whose orbs were as her darkening skies,

And as her spirit, tender.

Girt with that strength, first-born of right,

Held fast by deeds of honour,
Her robe she wove with rays more bright

Than Heaven could rain upon her.

* Written at the age of sixteen.
140

EARLIER POEMS

Where is that light — that citadel
That robe with woof of glory ?

She lost her virtue and she fell,
And only left her story.

141

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

SPIRITUAL ISOLATION : A FRAGMENT

My Maker shunneth me :

Even as a wretch stricken with leprosy,

So hold I pestilent supremacy.

Yea ! He hath Hed 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, hath flown ere love, to expiate

Its sinful stay where He did habitate.

142

EARLIER POEMS

Ah me, if they had left a sepulchre ;

But no — the light hath changed not, and in it

Of its same colour stir

Spirits I see not but phantasmed feel to flit.

Air, legioned with such, stirreth,

So that I seem to draw them with my breath,

Ghouls that devour each joy they do to death,

Strange glimmering griefs and sorrowing silences

Bearing dead flowers unseen whose charnel smell

Great awe to my sense is

Even in the rose-time when all else is well.

143

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

FAR AWAY

By what pale light or moon-pale shore
Drifts my soul in lonely flight ?
Regions God had floated o'er
Ere He touched the world with light ?

Not in Heaven and not in earth
Is this water, is this moon ;
For there is no starry birth,
And no dawning and no noon.

Far away — O far away,
Mist-born — dewy vapours rise
From the dim gates of the day
Far below in earthly skies.

Ill

EARLIER POEMS

SPRING

I walk and I wonder

To hear the birds sing ;

Without you, my lady,

How can there be Spring ?

I see the pink blossoms

That slept for a year,

But who could have waked them

While you were not near ?

Birds sing to the blossoms,
Blind, dreaming your pink ;
These blush to the songsters,
Your music they think :
So well had you taught them
To look and to sing,
Your bloom and your music,
The ways of the Spring.

145

TOEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

SONG

A silver rose to show

Is your sweet face ;

And like the heavens1 white brow.

Sometime God's battle-place,

Your blood is quiet now.

Your body is a star

Unto my thought ;

But stars are not too far,

And can be caught —

Small pools their prisons are.

14(5

EARLIER POEMS

HEART'S FIRST WORD. I.

To sweeten a swift minute so

With such rare fragrance of sweet speech,

And make the after hours go

In a blank yearning each on each ;

To drain the springs till they be dry,

And then in anguish thirst for drink ;

So but to glimpse her robe thirst I,

And my soul hungers and I sink.

There is no word that we have said
Whereby the lips and heart are fire ;
No look the linked glances read
That held the springs of deep desire.
And yet the sounds her glad lips gave
Are on my soul vibrating still ;
Her eyes that swept me as a wave
Shine my soul's worship to fulfil.

Her hair, her eyes, her throat and chin —
Sweet hair, sweet eyes, sweet throat, so sweet,
147

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

So fair because the ways of sin

Have never known her perfect feet —

By what far ways and marvellous

May I such lovely heaven reach ?

What dread, dark seas and perilous

Lie "twixt love's silence and love's speech?

148

EARLIER POEMS

HEART'S FIRST WORD. II.

And all her soft dark hair

Breathed for him like a prayer,

And her white lost face

Was prisoned to some far place.

Love was not denied —

Love's ends would hide,

And flower and fruit and tree

Were under its sea.

Yea, its abundance knelt

Where the nerves felt

The springs of feeling flow

And made pain grow !

There seemed no root or sky,

But a pent infinity

Where apparitions dim

Sculptured each whim

In flame and wandering mist

Of kisses to be kist.

149

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

LADY, YOU ARE MY GOD

Lady, you are my God —
Lady, you are my Heaven.

If I am your God

Labour for your Heaven.

Lady, you are my God,

And shall not love win Heaven ?

If love made me God
Deeds must win my Heaven.

If my love made you God,
What more can I for Heaven ?

150

EARLIER POEMS

IF YOU ARE FIRE

If you are fire and I am fire,
Who blows the flame apart
So that desire eludes desire
Around one central heart ?

A single root and separate bough,
And what blind hands between
That make our longing's mutual glow
As if it had not been ?

151

POEMS 1JV ISAAC ROSENBERG

IN THE UNDERWORLD

I have lived in the underworld so long :
How can vou, a creature of light,
'Without terror understand the song
And unmoved hear what moves in night ?

I am a spirit that yours has found,

Strange, undelightful, obscure,

Created by some other God, and bound

In terrible darkness, breathing breath impure.

Creature of light and happiness,

Deeper the darkness was when you,

With your bright terror eddying the distress,

Grazed the dark waves and shivering further Hew.

152

EARLIER POEMS

O, IN A WORLD OF MEN AND WOMEN

O, in a world of men and women,
Where all things seemed so strange to me,
And speech the common world called human
For me was a vain mimicry,

I thought — O, am I one in sorrow ?
Or is the world more quick to hide
Their pain with raiment that they borrow
From pleasure in the house of pride ?

O joy of mine, O longed-for stranger,
How I would greet you if you came :
In the world's joys I've been a ranger,
In my world sorrow is their name.

153

POEMS HY ISAAC ROSENBERG

A GIRL'S THOUGHTS

Dim apprehension of a trust
Comes over me this quiet hour,
As though the silence were a flower,
And this, its perfume, dark like dust.

My individual self would cling
Through fear, through pride, unto its fears
It strives to shut out what it hears,
The founts of being murmuring.

O ! Need, whose hauntings terrorize ;
Whether my maiden ways would hide,
Or lose and to that need subside,
Life shrinks and instinct dreads surprise.

154

EARLIER TOEMS

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.

I 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.
155

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

And my soul thought :

" What fearful land have my steps wandered to?
God's love is everywhere, but here is naught
Save love His anger slew."

And as I stood

Lost in promiscuous bewilderment,
Which to my mazed soul was wonder-food,
A girl in garments rent

Peered 'neath lids shamed
And spoke to me and murmured to my blood.
My soul stopped dead, and all my horror Hamed
At her forgot of God.

Her hungered eyes,

Craving and yet so sadly spiritual,

Shone like the unsmirched corner of a jewel

Where else foul blemish lies.

I walked with her

Because my heart thought, " Here the soul is clean,
The fragrance of the frankincense and myrrh
Is lost in odours mean."

She told me how

The shadow of black death had newly come
1 56

EARLIER POEMS

And touched her father, mother, even now
Grim-hovering in her home,

Where fevered lay

Her wasting brother in a cold, bleak room,
Which theirs would be no longer than a day,
And then — the streets and doom.

Lord ! Lord ! Dear Lord !
I knew that life was bitter, but my soul
Recoiled, as anguish-smitten by sharp sword,
Grieving such body's dole.

Then grief gave place

To a strange pulsing rapture as she spoke ;
For I could catch the glimpses of God's grace,
And a desire awoke

To take this trust

And warm and gladden it with love's new fires,
Burning the past to ashes and to dust
Through purified desires.

We walked our way,

One way hewn for us from the birth of Time ;
For we had wandered into Love's strange clime
Through ways sin waits to slay.
157

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Love's euphony,

In Love's own temple that is our glad hearts,
Makes now long music wild deliriously ;
Now Grief hath used his darts.

Love infinite,

Chastened by sorrow, hallowed by pure flame-
Not all the surging world can compass it.
Love — Love — O tremulous name !

God's mercy shines ;

And my full heart hath made record of this,
Of grief that burst from out its dark confines
Into strange sunlit bliss.

158

EARLIER POEMS

TESS

The free fair life that has never been mine, the

glory that might have been,
If I were what you seem to be and what I may

not be !
I know I walk upon the earth, but a dreadful wall

between
My spirit and your spirit lies, your joy and my

misery.

The angels that lie watching us, the little human

P^y,
What deem they of the laughter and the tears

that flow apart ?
When a word of man is a woman's doom do they

turn and wonder and say,
" Ah ! Why has God made love so great that

love must burst her heart ?""

159

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

THE NUN

So thy soul's meekness shrinks,
Too loth to show her face —
Why should she shun the world ?
It is a holy place.

Concealed to itself

If the flower kept its scent,

Of itself amorous,

Less rich its ornament.

Use — utmost in each kind —
Is beauty, truth in one,
AVhile soul rays light to soul
In one God-linked sun.

WO

EARLIER POEMS

IN PICCADILLY

Lamp-lit faces, to you
What is your starry dew ?
Gold flowers of the night blue !

Deep in wet pavement's slime
Mud -rooted is your fierce prime,
To bloom in lust's coloured clime.

The sheen of eyes that lust,
Which dew-time made your trust,
Lights your passionless dust.

161

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

A .MOOD

You are so light and gay,
So slight, sweet maid —
Your limbs like leaves in play,
Or beams that grasses braid ;
O ! Joys whose jewels pray
My breast to be inlaid.

Frail fairy of the streets ;
Strong, dainty lure ;
For all men's eyes the sweets
Whose lack makes hearts so poor
While your heart loveless beats.
Light, laughing, and impure.

O ! Fragrant waft of flesh,
Float through me so —
My limbs are in your mesh,
My blood forgets to flow ;
Ah ! Lilied meadows fresh,
It knows where it would go.

162

EARLIER POEMS

FIRST FRUIT

I did not pluck at all,
And I am sorry now :
The garden is not barred
But the boughs are heavy with snow,
The flake-blossoms thickly fall
And the hid roots sigh, " How long will
our flowers be marred P11

Strange as a bird were dumb,

Strange as a hueless leaf.

As one deaf hungers to hear,

Or gazes without belief,

The fruit yearned " Fingers, come !"

O, shut hands, be empty another year.

163

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

A CARELESS HEART

A little breath can make a prayer,
A little wind can take it
And turn it back again to air :
Then say, why should you make it ?

An ardent thought can make a word,
A little ear can hear it,
A careless heart forget it heard :
Then why keep ever near it ?

164

EARLIER POEMS

DAWN

0 tender first cold flush of rose,
O budded dawn, wake dreamily ;
Your dim lips as your lids unclose
Murmur your own sad threnody.
O as the soft and frail lights break
Upon vour eyelids, and your eyes
Wider and wider grow and wake,
The old pale glory dies.

And then, as sleep lies down to sleep
And all her dreams lie somewhere dead,
The iron shepherd leads his sheep
To pastures parched whose green is shed.
Still, O frail dawn, still in your hair
And your cold eyes and sad sweet lips,
The ghosts of all the dreams are there,
To fade like passing ships.

165

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

AT NIGHT

Crazed shadows, from no golden body
That I can .see, embrace me warm ;
All is purple and closed
Hound by night's arm.

A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices,
Wild lost voices of shadows white :
See the long houses lean
To the weird flight.

Star-amorous things that wake at sleep-time
(Because the sun spreads wide like a tree
With no good fruit for them)
Thrill secrecy.

Tale horses ride before the morning,
The secret roots of the sun to tread,
With hoofs shod with venom
And ageless dread ;

160'

EARLIER POEMS

To breathe on burning emerald grasses
And opalescent dews of the day,
And poison at the core
What smiles may stray.

167

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

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 flower:
Creation is each act of yours.
168

EARLIER POEMS

Your roots are God, the pauseless cause,
But your boughs sway to self-windy laws.
Perception is no dreamy birth
And magnifies transfigured earth.
With each new light, our eyes receive
A larger power to perceive.

If we could unveil our eyes,

Become as wise as the All-wise,

No love would be, no mystery :

Love and joy dwell in infinity.

Love begets love ; reaching highest

We find a higher still, unseen

From where we stood to reach the first ;

Moses must die to live in Christ,

The seed be buried to live to green.

Perfection must begin from worst.

Christ perceives a larger reachless love,

More full, and grows to reach thereof.

The green plant yearns for its yellow fruit.

Perfection always is a root,

And joy a motion that doth feed

Itself on light of its own speed.

And round its radiant circle runs,

Creating and devouring suns.

169

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

OF ANY OLD MAN

Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness
With alien uproar and rude jolly cries,
Which (satyr-like to a mild maiden's pride)
Ripen not wisdom but a large recoil ;
Give them their withered peace, their trial grave,
Their past youth's three-scored shadowy effigy.
.Mock them not with your ripened turbulence,
Their frost -mailed petulance with your torrid

wrath,
When, edging your boisterous thunders, shivers

one word
(Pap to their senile sneering, drug to truth,
The feigned rampart of bleak ignorance)
" Experience" — crown of naked majesties,
That tells us naught we know not, but confirms.
O think, you reverend shadowy austere,
Your Christ's youth was not ended when he died.

170

EARLIER POEMS

THE ONE LOST

I mingle with your bones ;
You steal in subtle noose
This lighted dust Jehovah loans
And now I lose.

What will the Lender say
When I shall not be found,
Safe-sheltered at the Judgment Day,
Being in you bound ?

He'll hunt through wards of Heaven,
Call to uncoffined earth
" Where is this soul, unjudged, not given
Dole for good's dearth ? "

And I, lying so safe

Within you, hearing all,

To have cheated God shall laugh,

Freed by your thrall.

171

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

WEDDED

They leave their love-lorn haunts,
Their sigh- warm floating Eden ;
And they are mute at once,
Mortals by God unheeden,
By their past kisses chidden.

But they have kist and known
Clear things we dim by guesses —
Spirit to spirit grown :
Heaven, born in hand-caresses .
Love, fall from sheltering tresses.

And they are dumb and strange:
Bared trees bowed from each other.
Their last green interchange
What lost dreams shall discover ?
Dead, strayed, to love-strange lover.

172

EARLIER POEMS

DON JUAN'S SONG

The moon is in an ecstasy,

It wanes not nor can grow ;

The heavens are in a mist of love,

And deepest knowledge know :

What things in nature seem to move

Bear love as I bear love ?

And bear my pleasures so?

I bear my love as streams that bear
The sky still flow or shake :
Though deep within, too far on high.
Light blossoms kiss and wake
The waters sooner than the sky ;
And if they kiss and die
God made them frail to break.

173

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

ON A LADY SINGING

She bade us listen to the singing lark
In tones far sweeter than its own :
For fear that she should cease and leave us dark
We built the bird a feigned throne,
Shrined in her gracious glory-giving ways
From sceptred hands of starred humility —
Praising herself the more in giving praise
To music less than she.

174

EARLIER POEMS

BEAUTY

As a sword in the sun —
A glory calling a glory —
Our eyes, seeing it run,
Capture its gleam for our story.

Singer, marvellous gleam
Dancing in splendid light,
Here you have brought us our dream-
All, but its stay is its flight !

175

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

A QUESTION

What if you shut your eyes and look,
Yea. look with all the spirit's eyes,
While mystic unrevealed skies
Unfold like pages of a book

Wherein new scenes of wonder rare
Are imaged, till the sense deceives
Itself, and what it sees believes —
Even what the soul has pictured there ?

17G

EARLIER POEMS

CHAGRIN

Caught still as Absalom,
Surely the air hangs
From the swayless cloud-boughs
Like hair of Absalom
Caught and hanging still.

From the imagined weight

Of spaces in a sky

Of mute chagrin my thoughts

Hang like branch-clung hair

To trunks of silence swung,

With the choked soul weighing down

Into thick emptiness.

Christ, end this hanging death,

For endlessness hangs therefrom !

Invisibly branches break
From invisible trees :
The cloud-woods where we rush
(Our eyes holding so much),
177

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

Which we must ride dim ages round

Ere the hands (we dream) can touch,

We ride, we ride — before the morning

The secret roots of the sun to tread —

And suddenly

We are lifted of all we know,

And hang from implacable boughs.

178

EARLIER POEMS

THE BLIND GOD

Streaked with immortal blasphemies,

Betwixt His twin eternities

The Shaper of mortal destinies

Sits in that limbo of dreamless sleep,

Some nothing that hath shadows deep.

The world is only a small pool
In the meadows of Eternity,
And men like fishes lying cool ;
And the wise man and the fool
In its depths like fishes lie.
When an angel drops a rod
And he draws you to the sky
Will you bear to meet your God
You have streaked with blasphemy ?

179

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

THE FEMALE GOD

We curl into your eyes —

They drink our fires 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 eyes1 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 ?
180

EARLIER POEMS

You have dethroned the ancient God,

You have usurped his Sabbath, his common days;

Yea, every moment is delivered to you,

Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God !

Our souls have passed into your eyes,

Our days into your hair ;

And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased

with the world,
Your world.

181

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

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.
182

EARLIER POEMS

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.

But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange ; and strange things are

forgetful.
Ah ' If the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us ; but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it,
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through
Where blind farewells are taken easily.

Ah, this miasma of a rotting God '

183

POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

SLEEP

Godhead's lip hangs

When our pulses have no golden tremors,
And his whips are flicked by mice
And all star-amorous things.

Drops, drops of shivering quiet

Filter under my lids.

Now only am I powerful.

What though the cunning gods outwit us her

In daytime and in playtime,

Surely they feel the gyves we lay on them

In our sleep.

O, subtle gods lying hidden !
(), gods with your oblique eyes !
Your elbows in the dawn, and wrists
Bright with the afternoon,
Do you not shake when a mortal slides
Into your own unvexed peace ?
184

EARLIER POEMS

When a moving stillness breaks over your knees

(An emanation of piled aeons'1 pressures),

From our bodies flat and straight,

And your limbs are locked,

Futilely gods',

And shut your sinister essences ?

185

POEMS liY ISAAC ROSENBERG

MY DAYS

My days are but the tombs of buried hours ;
Which tombs are hidden in the piled years ;
But from the mounds there spring up many flowers,
Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears.
Time, like a sexton, pileth mould on mould,
Minutes on minutes till the tombs are high;
Hut from the dust there fall some grains of gold,
And the dead corpse leaves what will never die —
It may be but a thought, the nursling seed
Of many thoughts, of many a high desire ;
Some little act that stirs a noble deed,
Like breath rekindling a smouldering fire:
They only live who have not lived in vain,
For in their works their life returns again.

M'>

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RECCW0EC12 1985

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DEC 17 1946

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495650

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY