tara christie
In ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’, Hill digs up the forgotten remnants left by the careless and
bloodyparade not just of history, but of literary history. In this poem, Hill speaks
‘for Isaac Rosenberg’ since Rosenberg—like millions of young soldiers who died at
the Front—could no longer speak for himself.
Geoffrey Hill has had a career-long interest in Rosenberg, Eliot, and the Meta-
physical poets,^32 and although ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ was omitted from his first
volume,For the Unfallen(1959), Rosenberg is a tangible presence in the volume.
For the Unfallenparodies the title of the well-known First World War elegy etched
on countless war memorials, ‘For the Fallen’ (1914), written by the Georgian poet
Laurence Binyon,^33 Rosenberg’s friend and literary advisor. In his introductory
memoir to the first collected edition of Rosenberg’sPoems(1922), Binyon wrote
that Rosenberg ‘endured the inhuman horror of modern war with a great heart’
and, admitting that Rosenberg ‘would not have liked to be called a hero’, still
insisted that ‘his fortitude was truly heroic.’^34 In ‘For the Fallen’, Binyon penned
the well-known lines:
Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
·······
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.^35It is precisely with this type of war commemoration poem that Hill takes issue
in ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’. For Hill, it ‘followed, with ironic sense’ that Rosenberg
would have thus been mourned when he himself, like the young Hamlet, would
have objected to a ‘ceremony’ as ‘thin as’ that fallen soldier’s tribute delivered by
Fortinbras over Hamlet’s dead body:
(^32) Hill’s review essay on Eliot’sThe Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry,ed.RonaldSchuchard
(London: Faber, 1993), is entitled ‘Dividing Legacies,’ and is found in Hill’sStyle and Faith(New York:
Counterpoint, 2003), 141–62. While critics have traced Hill’s repeated allusions to the Metaphysicals,
I want to suggest that Hill’s own poetry and critical prose—as well as his interest in Rosenberg—create
alternative stories of twentieth-century engagement with the Metaphysical poets. Although Henry
Hart’sThe Poetry of Geoffrey Hilldeftly points out many of Hill’s allusions to Donne and Crashaw,
Hill has (since the publication of Hart’s book) further developed, both in his poetry and in his critical
prose, his career-long Metaphysical engagement, a subject about which there seems still significant
critical work to be done.
(^33) Laurence Binyon was a poet and art critic who took an early and active interest in Rosenberg’s
poetry in 1912, when Rosenberg was a student at the Slade. Binyon corresponded with Rosenberg
about his poetry until Rosenberg’s death.
(^34) Laurence Binyon, ‘Introductory Memoir’, inPoems by Isaac Rosenberg, 11.
(^35) Binyon, ‘For the Fallen’, in George Herbert Clarke (ed.),A Treasury of War Poetry: British and
American Poems of the World War(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917), 126.