santanu das
more than any other genre, Eliot’s claim about the ‘dissociation of sensibility’.^67
Apartfrom David Jones, Rosenberg was perhaps the only soldier-poet who had
a ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought’.^68 ‘Every space brimful of meaning;
touched with adumbrations of some subtly felt idea’:^69 his pronouncements on
Italian painting can equally be applied to his own art. His pre-war verse, such
as ‘[We are sad with a vague sweet sorrow]’, ‘[Wistfully in pallid splendour]’, or
‘[Sacred, voluptuous hollows deep]’, is marked by a lush sub-Keatsian vocabulary,
its ‘low murmur’^70 and ‘pale flower’^71 reminiscent of the early verse of Sassoon and
Owen. Yet his love lyrics also combine sensuality with playfulness in a way that
aligns him with a different tradition:
Even now your eyes are mixed with mine.
I see you not, but surely, he—
This stricken gaze, has looked on thee.
From him your glances shine.
Even now I felt your hand in mine.
This breeze that warms my open palm
Has surely kist yours...^72If Victorian aestheticism leaves its mark on the war poets from Brooke to Owen,
Rosenberg’s affinities are with the Metaphysicals: he carried a book of Donne’s
poems with him to the war. While an excess of affect at the surface of language and
images often characterizes both Decadent and First World War verse, in Rosenberg
the affect is located in the texture of thought.
Compare the following extracts, in which each soldier-poet mourns his comrade
in terms of his voice:
‘Your voice sings not so soft—
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft—
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear’.^73
(Owen, ‘Greater Love’)Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two—
Who for his hours of life had chattered through
Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent...^74
(Gurney, ‘The Silent One’)(^67) T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, inSelected Essays(London: Faber, 1951), 288.
(^68) Ibid. 286. (^69) Rosenberg, ‘Art’, inCollected Works, 292.
(^70) Rosenberg, ‘Love To Be’, inPoems and Plays, 26;
(^71) Rosenberg, ‘[Like some fair subtle poison]’, ibid. 40.
(^72) Rosenberg, ‘[Even now your eyes are mixed in mine]’, ibid. 68.
(^73) Owen, ‘Greater Love’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 166.
(^74) Gurney, ‘The Silent One’, inCollected Poems, 250.