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‘for isaac rosenberg’ 

Let four captains

BearHamlet like a soldier to the stage,

For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have proved most royal; and for his passage

The soldiers’ music and the rite of war

Speak loudly for him.

Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.^36

Hill’s elegy for Rosenberg shares the anger and bitterness of Sassoon’s anti-
commemoration poem ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’ (1937):

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,

The unheroic dead who fed the guns?

Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,—

Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.

Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;

Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,

The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride

‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.

Was ever an immolation so belied

As these intolerably nameless names?

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.^37

Like Sassoon’s poem, Hill’s ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ rejects the prideful pomp of
complacent and tidy commemoration songs sung by high-voiced chanters.
A brief (and by no means exhaustive) survey of the poetry and critical prose of
Hill testifies to his continued devotion to Rosenberg. In 1959, Hill reviewed the
Isaac Rosenberg Exhibition at Leeds University;^38 a few years later in his review of
Ted Hughes’s edition of theSelected Poems of Keith Douglas(1964), Hill discussed at
length Douglas’s affinity with Rosenberg.^39 InSpeech! Speech!(2000), a single poem
in 120 stanzas, Hill writes stanza 27 about Rosenberg^40 —27 being Rosenberg’s age
when he was killed at the Front. In the Dantean ecologue,The Orchards of Syon
(2001), Hill writes of

well-tended ground

ripe for laying waste, the Great War.

(^36) William Shakespeare,Hamlet,v. ii. 374–82.
(^37) Sassoon attended Belgian King Albert’s inauguration of the Menin Gate on 24 July 1927. The
next day in his hotel room he wrote this poem, which was not published until after his death. Siegfried
Sassoon, ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, in 38 Collected Poems 1908–1956(London: Faber, 1984), 173.
39 Hill, ‘Isaac Rosenberg Exhibition, at Leeds University’,New Statesman, 6 (June 1959), 795.
40 Hill, ‘ ‘‘I in Another Place’’:Homage to Keith Douglas’,Stand, 6/4 (1964/5), 6–13.
Hill,Speech! Speech!(Washington: Counterpoint, 2000), 14.