‘for isaac rosenberg’ Rosenberg’, reads: ‘I would show her tilted head to Isaac Rosenberg’.^67 Asreaders
of this poem, we are asked to consider the connectedness of that tragic fate shared
by Jessica and Rosenberg—a fate which led not only to early death (both died in
their twenties) but also to obscurity, be it in family or in literary history.
Longley’s attentiveness to Rosenberg’s ‘difficult poems’ brings us to one final
connection between them. It has been said that ‘Rosenberg, the more ‘‘difficult’’
and unEnglish of the...[war] poets...had the greater impact on the young [Keith]
Douglas’.^68 The same might be said of Longley. For if not ‘greater’ than that of
Owen and Edward Thomas, Rosenberg’s impact on Longley is certainly different
from that made on him by Owen’s poetry of pity and Thomas’s wartime pastoral
poetics. It is Rosenberg’s refractory and impersonal stance on war’s suffering that
Longley loves and looks for in Rosenberg. Christopher Gillie writes:
Rosenberg did not hate the war less than Owen did, but he accepted it impersonally
as—inhuman as it was—a world of experience which could be assimilated into his poetic
consciousness and enlarge it. Unlike Owen, he did not see a vocation in war poetry as such,
but the war was the fact, and as a fact it had to be lived through.^69
Objecting in one letter to ‘Rupert Brooke’s begloried sonnets’, Rosenberg claimed
that the war ‘should be approached in a colder way, more abstract, with less
of the million feelings everybody feels; or all these should be concentrated in
one distinguished emotion’.^70 Longley writes with Rosenberg’s self-containment,
his withholding of sentimentalism, his extinction of poetic personality, and his
conscious abstraction of personal experience in order for it to speak universally:
He was preparing an Ulster fry for breakfast
When someone walked into the kitchen and shot him:
A bullet entered his mouth and pierced his skull,
The books he had read, the music he could play.
·········
They rolled him up like a red carpet and left
Only a bullet hole in the cutlery drawer:
Later his widow took a hammer and chisel
And removed the black keys from his piano.^71The Irish poet CathalO Searcaigh sees the role of the poet as ‘archivist ́ ...recording
and registering what is past or passing’.^72 O Searcaigh feels the obligation to sift ́
through and reconstruct meaning out of the ‘remnants left by the careless and
(^67) Longley, Michael Longley archive.
(^68) William Scammell,Keith Douglas: A Study(London: Faber, 1988), 27.
(^69) Christopher Gillie,Movements in English Literature: 1900–1940(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1975), 73–4. 70
71 Rosenberg to Mrs Cohen, n.d., inCollected Works, 237.
Longley, ‘The Civil Servant’, in ‘Wreaths’, inCollected Poems, 118.
(^72) CathalO Searcaigh, interviewed by John Brown, in Brown, ́ In the Chair, 257–8.