war poetry and the realm of the senses The song of the lark was one of the regular anomalies of trench life. A sergeant
notes,‘The ecstasy of the lark.—That is inseparably connected with ‘‘stand-to’’ in
the trenches.’^93 If in Blunden’sUndertones of War, the pastoral is always threatened
by the war, in the poem trench life is suddenly intruded upon by the pastoral,
and Rosenberg transforms it into a moment of transcendent beauty: ‘But hark!’.
However, as we strain to listen, it is neither song nor death that at first drops from
the dark, but rather the emotion of the listener. ‘Joy’ points beyond Rosenberg’s
essay ‘Joy’ to Blake’s ‘Infant Joy’,^94 butherethesoundisasimportantastheallusion:
the repetitive incantation creates its own strange music, gathering the word, like the
lark’s song, into the spell of the sensuous. On the other hand, the phrase ‘heights of
night’ is an acute piece of trench realism: cooped up in the bowels of the earth, the
soldiers experience space vertically rather than horizontally—as height rather than
volume—now resonant ‘with unseen larks’. Indeed, touch and sound are fused in
the ‘shower’ of music on the ‘upturned list’ning faces’, the word ‘upturned’ showing
the poem’s residual links with the painting, completing the circuit of synaesthesia.
And yet the moment of sensuousness is laced with danger as a shell could easily
accompany the song. This combination of beauty and menace is developed through
the celebrated final similes—first, the blind man’s dreams, and then the image of
a girl’s dark hair. The latter image is a recurring one, going back to his pre-war
lyrics—the ‘nestling hair of the night’ caressing the cheek or a woman’s ‘soft dark
hair’ breathing like a prayer^95 —showing how certain images persisted in his mind
and were harnessed to the new circumstances, here adding a sense of mystery and
eroticism.
This precarious relation between sensuousness and seriousness is pursued further
in ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and ‘Louse Hunting’. Both sparkle with a shrewd
ironic wit—something rare in First World War poetry—creating a certainfrisson
with the grimness of the subjects, and unsettling any stable response from the
reader. Behind both poems, one can detect echoes of Donne’s ‘The Flea’: whereas
the mingling of blood is replaced by the touching of hands in the former, the killing
of the flea gets brilliantly transposed into the ritual of delousing as Donne’s conceit
of ‘self-murder’^96 is invested with an immediate and ominous significance. The
opening line of the first poem—‘The darkness crumbles away’^97 —captures the act
rather than the object of perception: to the soldiers in their muddy, subterranean
world, the enclosing walls of the trenches are conflated with the encompassing
darknesswhichinturnseemstogainmateriality.LookingforwardtoBarbusse’s
(^93) Unnamed sergeant, quoted in Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 242.
(^94) William Blake, ‘Infant Joy’, inComplete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966), 118.
(^95) Rosenberg, ‘Night’, inPoems and Plays, 107; ‘Heart’s First Word [II]’, ibid., 112.
(^96) John Donne, ‘The Flea’, inTheCompleteEnglishPoems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1996), 58. 97
Rosenberg, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, inPoems and Plays, 128.