war poetry and the realm of the senses Untuned air shall lap the stillness
Intheoldspaceofthevoice—
The voice that once could mirror
Remote depths
Of moving being,
Stirred by responsive voices near,
Suddenly stilled forever.^75
(Rosenberg, ‘In War’)The lushness of Owen’s lament ends up hushing the voice being mourned for;
Gurney, quieter and perhaps more shrewdly observant, evokes the voice in all its
delicate chatter through one powerful regional detail. What attracts Rosenberg,
by contrast, is the sensuousness of the idea: the imagined passage of the wind or
the voice, moving across, creating or vacating space as air replaces the voice, both
invested with palpable materiality. Unlike in Owen, rhyme does not intrude on the
silence,nordoesthewindmurmur:‘untuned’(implyingacontrastwiththe‘musical’
voice),theair partakesofthevery‘stillness’whichitnowcaresses,buildingup almost
an architectonics of silence; there is also a hint of an underlying aquamarine imagery
(‘lap...stillness...mirror...depths’) which ballasts the spatial metaphor. Touch,
sight, and sound are all intrinsic to the idea as Rosenberg evolves synaesthesia into an
intellectual apparatus without losing any of its immediacy; there is great tenderness
and intimacy in the image of the voice mirroring the ‘remote depths’ or vibrating
in playful response. While Owen sensuously enacts moments, in Rosenberg we
have the investigation and analysis of the senses. While lines and whole stanzas of
Owen spring to the tip of our tongue without the least bidding—and the ‘Infinite
lovely chatter of Bucks accent’ is perhaps as difficult to forget for the readers as it
was for the narrator—the irregular length and quirky rhythm of Rosenberg’s lines
resist easy memorization: this is perhaps one of the surest tests of not only how the
sensory axis changes as we pass from Owen or even Gurney to Rosenberg, but of
how war poetry registers the shock of a more radical modernist aesthetic.
Rosenberg’s background may partly explain his divergence from the dominant
vocabulary and poses of thefin de si`ecle. The son of immigrant Jews from Lithuania
and growing up amidst poverty in the working-class surroundings in the East
End of London, Rosenberg could not lay claim on the English language with the
ease and felicity of the ‘officer-poets’, bequeathed to them largely by their public
school education. Instead, as he writes, ‘nobody ever told me what to read, or
ever put poetry in my way’.^76 However, the lack of formal training, coupled with
his Jewish background, left him free from the levelling influence of middle-class
English prose, its tradition and pressures. ‘I am rough now, and new, and will
have no tailor’ reads a line from ‘Moses’; in a letter to Edward Marsh in 1914,
(^75) Rosenberg, ‘In War’, inPoems and Plays, 131–2.
(^76) Rosenberg to Miss Seaton, n.d. [1911], inCollected Works, 181.