tara christie
Lawrence’s Eastwood, Rosenberg
inStepney and Whitechapel—I’m
ordered to speak plainly, let what is
speak for itself...^41On ‘The Geoffrey Hill Study Centre’, an educational website dedicated to ‘the
English poet, essayist and teacher, Geoffrey Hill’, Rosenberg is one of three figures
to have his own separate hyperlink page.^42 There is, in short, further critical work
to be done on Hill’s Rosenberg. And what ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ shows is not only
Hill’s high estimation of Rosenberg’s place in literary history, but also Hill’s first
attempt to pay homage to a poet who remains, in spite of the critical neglect, a vital
and continuing presence in twentieth-century poetry.
In 1998, Hill returned to Keble College, Oxford—the very place in which he had
penned ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ in the early 1950s—to deliver his Warton Lecture on
English Poetry, ‘Isaac Rosenberg, 1890–1918’, which concluded:
Even after seventy years Rosenberg does not have the kind of acceptance that comes with
various forms of recognised accessibility; butthe intrinsic value of his work was recognised
immediately [and] it became known and has been so recognised ever since:
Living in a wide landscape are the flowers—
Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying—These words, by one of the two outstanding British poets of the Second World War,
Keith Douglas, serve as a fitting conclusion. Douglas, of course, does notonlyrepeat what
Rosenberg was saying: the words of his tribute are those of an indebtedness in which there
is no mere repetition, no transiency; nothing redundant.^43
Keith Douglas’s ‘repetition’ of Rosenberg in the poem ‘Desert Flowers’ (1943) is
a fitting segue to a discussion of the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley. In the
poem ‘Bog Cotton’ (1979), Longley reaches back to Rosenberg by way of Keith
Douglas and ‘nearly repeat[s]’ Douglas repeating Rosenberg:
Let me make room for bog cotton, a desert flower—
Keith Douglas, I nearly repeat what you were saying
When you apostrophised the poppies of Flanders
And the death of poetry there: that was in Egypt
Among the sandy soldiers of another war.
········
You saw that beyond the thirstier desert flowers
There fell hundreds of thousands of poppy petals
Magnified to blood stains by the middle distance(^41) Hill,The Orchards of Syon(Washington: Counterpoint, 2002), 18.
(^42) ‘The Geoffrey Hill Study Centre’:http://www3.sympatico.ca/sylvia.paul/ghillarchives.htm
(^43) Hill,‘Isaac Rosenberg, 1890–1918’, 228.