tara christie
Keep, within the minds of girls,
Abrightimperishablename—
And no one breaks upon their game.
Yet men who mourn their hero’s fall,
Layinghimintradition’sbed—
With high-voiced chantings and the tall
Complacent candles at his head—
Still leave much carefully unsaid.
When probing Hamlet was aware
That Death in a worn body lay
Cramped beneath the lobby-stair—
(Whose mystery was burnt away
Through the intensity of decay)—
It followed, with ironic sense,
That he himself, who ever saw
Beneath the skin of all pretence,
Should have been carried from the floor
With shocked, tip-toeing drums before.
With ceremony thin as this
We tidy death; make life as neat
As an unquiet chrysalis
That is the symbol of defeat:
A worm in its own winding-sheet...^18Hill recently recalled that he was first introduced to Rosenberg’s verse through a
review ofThe Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg(1949) in the short-lived literary
magazineNine.^19 Entitled ‘A Robust Poet’, Ralph Houston’s review addresses the
general neglect of Rosenberg’s verse and names T. S. Eliot, in particular, as one of
Rosenberg’s rare ‘influential admirers’:
Isaac Rosenberg was killed in France in 1918. Since then he has had a fit audience, though
few, and some of his influential admirers have done much to draw the public’s attention to
him. The original ‘mention in despatches’ by Mr. Eliot was followed by an excellent article
by Denys Harding...and a review of the complete works by Dr. Leavis....Despite these
efforts, however...Rosenberg is seldom mentioned in discussions of poetry today. But if
(^18) Geoffrey Hill, ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’,Isis, 11 (Oxford: The Fantasy Press, 1952); quoted by
permission of Geoffrey Hill. After writing to Hill in 2003, I am pleased to report that Hill has
granted permission for the poem to be reprinted on ‘The Geoffrey Hill Server’, a website devoted
to Hill’s work. The poem can now be found athttp://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/anglais/geoffrey-
hill/english/poems.php?id=Rosen
(^19) In a letter to the author (27 Feb. 2004), Geoffrey Hill’s assistant, Ellen Wrigley, writes: ‘Professor
Hill asked that I let you know that he discoveredIsaac Rosenberg through a review in the magazine
Nine, of which about twelve issues appeared in the early 1950s in the United Kingdom. The
editor/publisher of the magazine is Peter Russell.’ The Rosenberg edition that Houston reviewed was
edited by Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding and published in London by Chatto & Windus in
1949.