tara christie
Longley puts an extraordinary amount of pressure on himself to commemorate
andremember when the act of remembering is, literally, a re-membering of body
parts, agivingof ‘skin and bones’ to those whose bodies were not granted proper
burial, whose bodies and legacies are misplaced.^64
Longley’s ‘No Man’s Land’ also pays homage to Rosenberg as an author of
‘difficult poems’ (‘and in No Man’s Land|What is there to talk about but difficult
poems?’). In one letter to R. C. Trevelyan, who was just one of many to confess
that they found Rosenberg’s poetry ‘difficult’, Rosenberg justified the complexity
of his poetry by pointing to the environment in which it was written: ‘I know
my faults are legion; a good many must be put down to the rotten conditions
I wrote it in—the whole thing was written in the barracks, and I suppose you
know what an ordinary soldier’s life is like.’^65 The manner and mode in which
Longley’s poem is written testify to Rosenberg’s complex modernist experiments
in poetry. Creating meaning out ofotherwise arbitrary connections between the
two long-forgotten Anglo-Jewish figures from the East End of London, Longley’s
poetic imagination draws parallels between Jessica and Rosenbergthat are not unlike
those which Virginia Woolf draws between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren
Smith. After drawing our attention to Jessica’s ‘dog-eared daguerreotype’, Longley
describes the familiar daguerreotype of Rosenberg dressed in khaki uniform with
gleaming ‘brass buttons’ that ‘catch the light a little’.^66 Because the bodies of Jessica
and Rosenberg were never recovered, their daguerreotypes become larger-than-life
relics as the last remaining testaments to the presence of the once-living flesh.
Yet ‘No Man’s Land’ is no Victorian relic poem; Longley’s Rosenberg is an
‘utterly modern’ poet who wrote ‘difficult’ modern poetry in the trenches. Like the
sight of Molly Bloom’s arm throwing a coin out of the window to the one-legged
sailor in Joyce’sUlysses, a single event—here, the sound of broken glass—becomes
Longley’s way to connect the otherwise disparate strands of simultaneous human
experience. Citing the ‘one story’ told of Jessica—that of his grandfather tossing ‘a
brick through a rowdy neighbour’s window’—Longley turns to ask Rosenberg if
he is able to ‘pick out that echo of splintering glass|From under the bombardment’
in No Man’s Land. Longley’s apostrophe to Rosenberg—‘I tilt her head towards
you, Isaac Rosenberg’—demonstrates that ‘No Man’s Land’ is a poem not only
written ‘in memory of Isaac Rosenberg’ but also writtendirectly toIsaac Rosenberg.
Longley’s anxiety over the direct address to Rosenberg (perhaps tinged with a bit of
non-combatant guilt?) is revealed in the unpublished manuscripts, in which ‘your
body’ (Rosenberg’s) reads ‘his body’, and the line, ‘I tilt her head towards you, Isaac
(^64) See Longley’s poem, ‘Pipistrelle’, which begins: ‘They kept him alive for years in warm water,|The
soldier who had lost his skin’ ( 65 Cenotaph of Snow, 47).
66 Rosenberg to R. C. Trevelyan, n.d. [postmarked 15 June 1916], inCollected Works, 235.
See the dog-eared daguerreotype included in Rosenberg’s letter to Sydney Schiff (dated Oct.
1915) and another printed along with Rosenberg’s letter to Edward Marsh (dated late Dec. 1915), in
Collected Works, 220 and 228.