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 tara christie

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs

Tighteningits lusts and luxuries.^24

When we stop to ask why Hill would allude to Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’ in a
poem for Isaac Rosenberg, we see that it is in part because Hill identifies Rosenberg as
a Metaphysical poet, ‘who’, like Webster and Donne, ‘ever saw [the skull]|Beneath
the skin’. Over time, Hill would continue to identify the Metaphysical strain
in Rosenberg’s poetry; in a lecture delivered in 1998, for example, Hill referred
to Rosenberg’s ‘knowledge of and appreciation of Donne’ when he complained that
Rosenberg’s work was still ‘among the exotica, not within the canon’.^25
Yet Hill’s allusion to Eliot may have less to do with Donne’s influence on Rosen-
berg, and more to do with Rosenberg’s influence on Donne. Rosenberg’s poems,
particularly those written in the trenches, attest to the ways in which Metaphysical
poetry was appropriate to themise en sc`eneat the Western Front. In one of Rosen-
berg’s most widely known and anthologized poems, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’
(1916), Donne’s ‘The Flea’ is invoked by the soldier-speaker who reaches up to pull
a ‘parapet’s poppy’ and encounters, not a flea, but a ‘queer sardonic’ trench rat:

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.^26

Having first ‘touched this English hand’ on its way to do ‘the same to’ a German
soldier’s hand, the rat reminds us that the poet (Private Rosenberg, 3rd Platoon,
King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment) was sitting in the trenches and reworking
the opening lines from Donne’s ‘The Flea’:

Marke but this flea, and marke in this,

How little that which thou deny’st me is;

It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee;

And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee...^27

(^24) Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, inThe Complete Poems and Plays(London: Faber, 1969), 52.
(^25) Hill, ‘Isaac Rosenberg, 1890–1918’,Proceedings of the British Academy: 1998 Lectures and Memoirs,
101 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213.
(^26) Rosenberg, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, inPoems and Plays, 128.
(^27) John Donne, ‘The Flea’, inThe Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent,
1985), 47.