war poetry, or the poetry of war? Somewhere they must have gone,
Andflung on your hard back
Is their soul’s sack,
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.Even as he poses the question, we know that he does not believe it to be true. The
earth may claim the emptied body—that mesh which encompassed the living man,
denying him the powers of true perception—but his most potent, powerful aspect
has escaped its grasp. The unknown, that which is beyond man’s ability to reach
but for which he strives in his endless search for the hidden reality, that indefinite
ideal which is the poet’s goal—it is there that their dark imaginings have gone.
There is, though, a realization in this poem that man is not only the victim of
such wilful destruction: he is also brutish, the destroyer, the inheritor of that malign
kiss. For, as the limber hurtles forward towards the wounded man lying in its path,
it iswewho crash round the bend as the choked soul stretches ‘weak hands|To
reach the living word the far wheels said’,wewho hear his weak scream, his very
last sound as the wheels of our plunging limber graze his dead face. In the end, war
is the creation of man. Man can no longer blame a tyrannical, jealous God for his
suffering; nor—despite the crown of thorns, the sceptres old—can he control the
forces of destruction that he has himself unleashed.
Rosenbergreturnstotheideaofthereleaseofthesoulfromthebodyin‘Daughters
of War’, the poem that he considered to be his most significant exploration of war.
Certainly it is his most abstracted, as the Daughters dance and call to the spirits of the
dead before their last cries fade among the boughs of the tree of life. He told Marsh
that he was trying to get ‘that sense of inexorableness the human (or inhuman) side
of this war has[.] It even penetrates behind human life.’^35 It reaches down, deep
into the ‘underside of things|And shut from earth’s profoundest eyes’,^36 and rises
up into the huge embraces of the waiting Daughters, mighty Amazonians who sigh
with longing for the souls that will be released as their human lovers are slain. And
as they die, as the earth-men’s earth falls away clean of the dust of old days, these
earthly forms and days are burned to a grey ash that drifts in the wind as they move
into timelessness, all human love now faded.
The achievement of these extraordinary poems is even greater when one realizes
the conditions under which they were written. As a private, Rosenberg suffered the
greatest of privations and the most exposed of trench experiences, and he had no
one with whom to share his thoughts, except by letter. ‘I believe if I met anybody
with ideas I’d be dumb,’ he wrote at the beginning of 1918. ‘No drug could be
more stupefying than our work...and this goes on like that old torture of water
trickling, drop by drop unendingly, on one’s helplessness.’^37 That he responded to
(^35) Rosenberg to Edward Marsh, n.d. [postmarked 30 July 1917], inCollected Works, 260.
(^36) Rosenberg, ‘Daughters of War’, inPoems and Plays, 142.
(^37) Rosenberg to Gordon Bottomley, n.d. [postmarked 26 Feb. 1918], inCollected Works, 268.