vivien noakes
that to attain to this height, not greater dexterity, but greater humility and beauty of
thoughtwere needed...After all, my friend, it is better to live a grey life in mud and
danger, so long as one uses it—as I trust I am now doing—as a means to an end.
Someday all this experience may be crystallized and glorified in me; and men shall
learn...what thoughts haunted the minds of men who watched the darkness grimly in
desolate places.^7
The need to be soaked in the experience of war, and then to allow time for a
full understanding of its significance to be realized before it could be adequately
expressed, was felt also by Isaac Rosenberg, writing to Laurence Binyon in the
autumn of 1916: ‘I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation,
shall not master my poeting; that is, if I am lucky enough to come through all right.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with
the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself
into poetry later on.’^8
For Rosenberg, who was killed on 1 April 1918, there was no ‘later on’. For David
Jones—who, like Rosenberg, had trained as an artist—it was different, although it
was not until many years after the war that he developed as a poet:In Parenthesis
began as a plan ‘to do a lot of illustrations with long ‘‘captions’’ of a sort’.^9
Rosenberg, by contrast, was a long way down the road of his poetic development
before war broke out, and he carried the central concerns of this earlier work into
his trench poetry.
The pre-war Rosenberg was part urban poet, part mystic, and in his Jewishness
he was above all a poet of exile. Central to his vision is the idea that man has been
banished from his spiritual base, cut adrift in a world in which he can never feel
at home, exiled from an existence of which he, Rosenberg, was only dimly aware
but of whose reality he had no doubt, and for which, all his life, his soul longed.
Night is the time when the physical senses sleep and the soul can awaken: in the
light of dawn the poet’s vision fades. He saw man living this daily life caught in a
body which, with Donne, he called a ‘soul’s sack’.^10 ‘How can I burst this trammel
of my flesh’, he wrote in 1912,‘That is a continent ’twixt your song and me?|How
can I loosen from my soul this mesh|That dulls mine ears and blinds mine eyes to
see?’^11 His longing was for a parallel existence, what he called ‘an indefinitent ’twixt
ideal; the haunting desire for that which is beyond the reach of hands’.^12 For him,
(^7) Ivor Gurney to Marion Scott, 15 Dec. 1916, inCollected Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington
and Manchester: MidNag/Carcanet, 1991), 171. 8
Rosenberg to Laurence Binyon, n.d. [Autumn 1916], inCollected Works, 248.
(^9) Jones, quoted in Jonathan Miles,Backgrounds to David Jones: A Study in Sources and Drafts
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990), 80.
(^10) Rosenberg, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, inThe Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg,ed.VivienNoakes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 140. The image is from Donne’s ‘Elegy IX: The Autumnal’,
inComplete English Poems 11 , ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985), 154.
Rosenberg, ‘Night and Day’, inPoems and Plays, 47.
(^12) Rosenberg to Miss Seaton, n.d. [1911], inCollected Works, 184.