‘for isaac rosenberg’ the public still considers that it can get along very well without good poetry, I am sure that
contemporarypoets need Rosenberg’s assistance, anassistance he gives us by example.^20
Given the fact that Eliot was not a commander on the battlefield, Houston’s use of
the military phrase is perhaps not without irony in its lament for Rosenberg’s lack of
recognition. Not unlike a ‘mention in despatches’ drowned out by higher-priority
military reports in a time of war, Eliot’s praise of Rosenberg in 1920 (quoted below)
would go virtually unheard amidst other clarion calls for modern poetry:
During the last few years an enormous mass of verse has been printed....There are three
or four poets whose verse is worth reading....Let the public...ask itself why it has never
heard of the poems of T. E. Hulme and Isaac Rosenberg, and why it has heard of the poems
of Lady Precocia Pondoeuf and has seen a photograph of the nursery in which she wrote
them. Let it trace out the writers who are spoken well of because it is to no one’s interest to
take the trouble to disparage them.^21
Henry Hart has suggested that Hill’s ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ mocks ‘sentimental
rites of remembrance’ and ‘grandiose public funerals’ by showing how his ‘two
princes’—namely, Rosenberg and Hamlet—‘succumb to the formalities they
denounce’.^22 While I agree with Hart, I want to suggest that Eliot is the third ghost
in the poem, and that the more elusive implications of Hill’s ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’
are not realized until we consider Eliot’s role in the poem. Like Houston’s review,
Hill’s poem makes its own remark about Eliot’s interest in Rosenberg and pays
powerful homage to the First World War poet about whom ‘much’ has been left
‘carefully unsaid’. Hill’s casting of Rosenberg in the role of Hamlet,^23 ‘who ever
saw|beneath the skin’, triggers the well-known opening lines of Eliot’s wartime
poem on the Metaphysicals, ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1918):
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!(^20) Ralph Houston, ‘A Robust Poet’,Nine, 3/1 (Dec. 1950), 78.
(^21) T. S. Eliot, ‘A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry’,Chapbook, 2 (Mar. 1920), 1–2.
(^22) Henry Hart,The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press,
1986), 21–2. 23
Hill draws from a history of comparisons between Donne and Hamlet. Joseph Duncan explains:
‘The emphasis upon the unfathomable mystery of Donne’s personality led almost inevitably to a
comparison with Hamlet. As early as 1880 Minto compared Donne, weak-willed, contemplative, and
despondent, to Shakespeare’s puzzling hero. Sanders declared that as W. E. Henley had written of
Robert Louis Stevenson, there was in Donne, ‘‘much Antony, of Hamlet most of all.’’ Rupert Brooke
later observed that ‘‘Hamlet, with his bitter flashes, his humour, his metaphysical inquisitiveness, and
his passion, continually has the very accent of the secular Donne, but that he is an avenger, not a
lover. To Ophelia he must have been Donne himself.’’ ’ (Duncan,The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959), 117).