war poetry and the realm of the senses lidded eye in ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, they are introduced in a matter-of-fact manner,
absorbedinto a broader argument or idea. As in Imagist poetry, a physical detail
can work as an ‘emotional and intellectual complex’,^85 revealing fresh connections
through the force of juxtaposition with other images. In the following extract, it
reveals the nexus between social inequality, industrial modernity, and war:
Iron are our lives
Molten right through our youth.
A burnt space through ripe fields
A fair mouth’s broken tooth.^86The East End Jew cannot lay claim to the ‘ripe fields’ of England in the way Thomas
or Blunden can; nor does the war make the mouth the legitimate site ofl’amour
impossible, as in Owen; the ‘iron’, on the other hand, carries traces of the world
of the ‘fiendish mangling-machine’ to which Rosenberg felt ‘chained’ at the age of
14 when he apprenticed to learn engraving and plate making.^87 The images here
suggest what Edgell Rickword notes in his essay ‘Poetry and Two Wars’ two decades
later: ‘to the majority of inhabitants, war only accentuates miseries which are part
and parcel of their daily lives.... war is the result of the same human will that
condemns the people to low and precarious standard of life whether engaged with
an external foe or not’.^88 While the socialist apects of Owen’s poetry are better
known—the plight of the soldiers on whom the ‘shutters and doors’ of society are
‘all closed, on us the doors are closed’^89 —Rosenberg is alert to that huge section of
the immigrant population to whom the doors of English society have never opened
at all, whether in war or in peace.
Rosenberg was particularly fortunate in having some wealthy Jewish women
as patrons who funded his education at the Slade. However, trained as an artist,
Rosenberg could not make up his mind whether he was a poet-painter or a painter-
poet. The painter’s eye informs his verse, evident in the title of one of his war
poems, ‘Marching—as seen 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.(^85) Ezra Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, in Peter Jones (ed.),Imagist Poetry(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), 130.
(^86) Rosenberg, ‘August 1914’, inPoems and Plays, 130.
(^87) Rosenberg to Miss Seaton, n.d. [before 1911], inCollected Works, 180.
(^88) Edgell Rickword, ‘Poetry and Two Wars’, inLiterature in Society: Essays and Opinions, ii:
1931–1978 89 , ed. Alan Young (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978), 158–9.
Owen, ‘Exposure’, 185.