war poetry, or the poetry of war? of painted canvas, and precious ointments to smear and heal the soul; and lovely
musicand poems’.^20
This poem has in it something of the idea that we see in Rupert Brooke’s
swimmers ‘into cleanness leaping’^21 —an idea, incidentally, that was shared by
more than just poets^22 —but which is here approached quite differently. The poet
whose work these images of winter in summer recall most closely is Wilfred Owen:
‘War broke: and now the Winter of the world|With perishing great darkness
closes in.’^23 But whereas Owen turns in the final lines to ‘the need|Of sowings for
new Spring, and blood for seed’—blood of the young men who will die—with
Rosenberg it is the corrosive power of the curse itself that must re-create the pristine
bloom that was destroyed by the malign kiss. Even after enlisting, Rosenberg still
expressed a belief in the possibility of personal re-creation through war: ‘One might
succumb[,] be destroyed—but one might also (and the chances are even greater
for it) be renewed, made larger, healthier.’^24 It was an idea that Gurney, much later
in the war, was to echo, though unwillingly: ‘when more dross is burnt out of me,
perhaps then I shall see Beauty clearly in everything. Yet O, that this purification
should come by war! Obscene and purely dreadful!’^25
In June 1915 Rosenberg wrote to Sydney Schiff: ‘I am thinking of enlisting if
they will have me, though it is against all my principles of justice—though I would
be doing the most criminal thing a man can do.’^26 He thought of joining the
R.A.M.C., ‘as the idea of killing upsets me a bit’,^27 but he was too small, and it
was as part of the 11th Battalion of the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment that
he was sent to France at the beginning of June 1916. His poem ‘The Troop Ship’,
describing the Channel crossing, is the 138th of his 158 surviving poems; we can see
how considerable his poetic output had been before he reached the front line. In
France, although he would later write that ‘Sometimes I give way and am appalled
at the devastation this life seems to have made in my nature’,^28 he would suffer no
shattering disillusionment, for this financially impoverished, but intellectually and
spiritually enriched, private soldier had no illusions to shed. His best trench poetry
would be a development, a maturing, of what had gone before.
(^20) Rosenberg to Edward Marsh, n.d. [Oct.–Nov. 1914], ibid., 206.
(^21) Rupert Brooke, ‘Peace’, inThe Poetical Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1960), 19.
(^22) e.g. Lieut.-General Sir Reginald C. Hart, ‘A Vindication of War’,Nineteenth Century and After,
414 (Aug. 1911), 238–9: ‘Peace is a disintegrating force, whereas war consolidates a people. War is no
doubt a dreadful ordeal, but it clears the air, and refines the race as fire purifies the gold and silver
in the furnace. Nations, like individuals, ultimatelybenefit by their chastenings—this is one of the
mysteries of Nature.’ I am grateful to Paul Laity for drawing my attention to this. 23
Wilfred Owen, ‘1914’, inTheCompletePoemsandFragments,i:The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy
(London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 116.
(^24) Rosenberg to Sidney Schiff, n.d. [Nov. 1915], inCollected Works, 221–2.
(^25) Gurney to Marion Scott, 31 Oct. 1917, inCollected Letters, 361.
(^26) Rosenberg to Sidney Schiff, n.d. [8 June 1915], inCollected Works, 216.
(^27) Rosenberg to Sidney Schiff, n.d. [early Nov. 1915], ibid. 221.
(^28) Rosenberg to Miss Seaton, 14 Feb. 1918, ibid. 268.