‘for isaac rosenberg’ Drawing on Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and ‘Break of Day’, Rosenberg’s poem re-
contextualizesDonne’s famous arguments for love where or when love is least
likely to occur (by way of a flea, or at daybreak, which threatens to separate
night-time lovers) and stretches them to new outlandish levels by arguing for love
at break of dayin the trenches, at the very moment when the fighting is to begin.
In the midst of the shock, trauma, and violence of the trenches, Rosenberg’s poems
deliberately call upon the Metaphysical Donne to help render the kind of experience
made intelligible only through what Samuel Johnson called the ‘far-fetched’ and
‘outlandish’ Metaphysical conceit.^28 For a discussion of Hill’s poem, the critical
converging point between Rosenberg and Eliot is this: that Rosenberg’s ‘Break of
Day in the Trenches’ (1916) reveals the ways in which Donne was reimagined
and reinterpreted at the Front, and that Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1918)
suggests the ways in which the deathscape at the Western Front shapes the lens
through which Eliot contemplates the Metaphysicalars moriendiof Webster and
Donne. It was not lost on Eliot that the imagery found in Webster and Donne was
appropriate to the imagery of war—and that poets like Rosenberg were engaging
with Donne and the Metaphysicals in an attempt to handle images of outlandish
horror witnessed at the Front. In unpublished drafts of ‘Whispers of Immortality’,
we see the great trouble Eliot had with the final lines. The change from the first-
person voice, ‘But I must crawl between dry ribs|To keep my metaphysics warm’,^29
to the collective first-person voice, ‘But our lot crawls between dry ribs|To keep
our metaphysics warm’,^30 may hint towards Eliot’s non-combatant guilt that, even
as he penned the lines, soldiers like Rosenberg were literally crawling between dry
ribs to keep their metaphysics warm.
Hill’s allusion to ‘Whispers of Immortality’ in ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ uncovers a
way to read Rosenberg back into the narrative we tell about the early twentieth-
century revival of Metaphysical poetry, and a way to recover Rosenberg as an
under-appreciated anticipatory figure of a literary phenomenon that would be
propagated as Eliot’s post-war Metaphysical revival. If Hill’s poem forges a critical
revaluation of Rosenberg’s work, it is (claims Jeffrey Johnson) because Hill’s poetry
attempts to give voice to the voiceless, lost, and marginalized figures from the past.
According to Johnson, Hill
stands...with a small guard of like-minded scouts, watching the horizon of the setting
sun and sifting the remnants left by the careless and bloody parade of history. He not only
watches and reconstructs meaning for the sake of history, he also observes with regret and
distress what has been left behind and lost.^31
(^28) Samuel Johnson, ‘The Life of Cowley’, inJohnson’s Lives of the Poets: A Selection,ed.J.P.Hardy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 12.
(^29) ‘Whispers of Immortality’, draft [A–B], lines 19–20, quoted in T. S. Eliot,Inventions of the
March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber, 1996), 365.
(^30) Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, inTheCompletePoemsandPlays, 53.
(^31) Jeffrey Johnson,Acquainted with the Night: The Shadow of Death in Contemporary Poetry
(Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2004), 48 and 50.