santanu das
Rosenberg writes, ‘In literature, I have no judgement—at least for style. If in
readinga thought has expressed itself to me, in beautiful words; my ignorance of
grammar etc. makes me accept that.’^77 It is this absence of what Adam Phillips
calls ‘the official grammar of association’^78 which results in the striking originality
of his thought and language, making it rich with the ‘coarseness engrained’ that
he so valued among the ‘great poets of the earth’.^79 Phrasessuchas‘cosmopolitan
rat’, ‘gargantuan fingers’, ‘incestuous worm’, ‘limbs as on ichor-fed’, ‘blood-dazed
intelligence’, or ‘Essenced to language’ open up new worlds in English poetry,
yoking acute details with a metaphoric imagination.^80 The last phrase is particularly
resonant, given Rosenberg’s awareness of the nature of the sign: ‘Snow is a strange
white word’, he writes in ‘On Receiving News of the War: Cape Town’.^81 At the
same time, perhaps more than any other poet, he evokes the sensuous world of
the trenches—the changing light over the parapets, a rat touching the hand, the
sudden burst of lark song, the ritual of louse hunting, the crunch of wheels over
the unburied dead—and these details are, in turn, used to explore certain social,
political, and personal questions.
Rosenberg was one of the few soldier-poets who joined the Army for financial
reasons. At the time of enlisting, he writes, ‘I would be doing the most criminal
thing a man can do.’^82 He had one of the longest stretches in France, serving almost
uninterruptedly for twenty-one months from June 1916 till his death during a
wiring patrol on 1 April 1918. During this period, the rigours of trench life were
compounded with him being a Jewish private in an English battalion marked out
by physical difference:
I could not get the work I thought I might so I have joined this Bantam Battalion (as I was
too short for any other) which seems to be the most rascally affair in the world. I have to eat
out of a basin together with some horribly smelling scavenger who spits and sneezes into it
etc....Besides my being a Jew makes it bad amongst these wretches.^83
Rosenberg’s letters expose aspects of trench life missing from the letters of the
officer-poets: the desperate plea for a pair of new boots or a cake; writing poetry
on lavatory paper or measuring his letter by the candle-light; sleeping on damp
floors and ‘coal-fatigueing all day (a most inhuman job)’.^84 But, unlike in Owen,
the war-torn body is seldom the theme or evolved into a lyric voice; bodily details
punctuate his poetry, but, like the ear with the poppy in ‘Break of Day’ or the
(^77) Rosenberg, ‘Moses’, inPoems and Plays, 189; Rosenberg to Edward Marsh, n.d. [May–June
1914], inCollected Works, 202.
(^78) Adam Phillips, ‘Isaac Rosenberg’s English’, inOn Flirtation(London: Faber, 1995), 186.
(^79) Rosenberg, ‘Emerson’ [?1913], inCollected Works, 288.
(^80) Rosenberg, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, 128; ‘Louse Hunting’, 136; ‘[A worm fed on the heart
of Corinth]’, 126; ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, 140 and 141; all inPoems and Plays.
(^81) Rosenberg, ‘On Receiving News of the War: Cape Town’, ibid. 83.
(^82) Rosenberg to Mr Schiff, 8 June 1915, inCollected Works, 216.
(^83) Rosenberg to Mr Schiff, n.d. [Oct. 1915], ibid. 219.
(^84) Rosenberg to Edward Marsh, n.d. [postmarked 5 Jan. 1916], ibid. 229.