‘for isaac rosenberg’ in the wilderness’. Crediting the larks withbringing Rosenberg’s ‘poems across
eternity’s barricade’ to him,O Searcaigh invokes Rosenberg’s ‘Returning, we hear ́
the larks’ (1917), in which a war-weary soldier is (asO Searcaigh writes) suddenly ́
‘stunned by siren larks’:
Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.
But hark! joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering on our upturned list’ning faces.
Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped....^83Feeling grateful for the larks’ song showering down upon him because he knows
all too well ‘What sinister threat lurks there’, Rosenberg’s soldier-speaker finds joy
and comfort even in the most threatening and dangerous of places.
Awed by Rosenberg’s ability to interpret the lark’s song as a sign that one should
celebrate life even in the midst of so much death,O Searcaigh confronts his own ́
non-combatant guilt as the ‘I who never’. The insistent repetition of that phrase
representsO Searcaigh’s increasing anxiety about aligning himself with Rosenberg. ́
It is as if, by a sheer act of will, inspired by and no less heroic than Rosenberg’s
own,O Searcaigh overcomes the guilt and can, at the end of the poem, stand with ́
Rosenberg and say to him: ‘I want to assure you, poet whose truth|was bared to
the bones in World War 1,|I too am on the side of light, and of life.’
(^83) Rosenberg, ‘Returning, we hear the larks’, inPoems and Plays, 138–9.