war poetry, or the poetry of war? true reality was invisible to the human eye but present in the soul. Only there, he
believed,could man’s spirit soar freely, for it is there that true beauty and joy exist,
a beauty that ‘sings and teaches her fair song|Of the Eternal rhythm’,^13 and joy that
is a recurring theme in his work. In a statement that applies equally to his poetry, he
wrote: ‘My ideal of a picture is to paint what we cannot see. To create, to imagine.
To make tangible and real a figment of the brain. To transport the spectator into
other worlds where beauty is the only reality.’^14 This idea was central to his ambition
to write ‘Simplepoetry—that is where an interesting complexity of thought is kept
in tone and right value to the dominating idea so that it is understandable and still
ungraspable.’^15
In Rosenberg’s early work we find a benevolent creator where ‘love is the
radiant smile of God’.^16 But this mood of orthodox acceptance is not sustained.
Instead, he came to see the Godhead as an uncaring tyrant, the architect of a
world in which man is trapped, played with like a toy, in which his vision is
dulled and his vitality trampled out, a world of banishment from all that is most
beautiful, all he most craves, as the jealous God who created man abandons him
to his fate. By the time he wrote his poem ‘God’ in late 1914 or 1915—after
the outbreak of war but before he had enlisted—we find an uncompromising
bitterness:
In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls...
Onfragmentsofaskullofpower,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more...
Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!^17In this deepening mood he wrote some of his most powerful poems, as his earlier
passivity in exile, a longing for that other, unattainable world, becomes a rebellious
contempt for the force that delights in destroying exiled man. It is a voice that finds
expression in lyric beauty as it combines a quiet, mystical awareness with passionate
protest at a situation over which he has no control.
In June 1914 Rosenberg was in South Africa staying with his sister, and there, in
August, he wrote ‘On Receiving News of the War’. The first two stanzas describe
the coming of winter into a summer land:
Snow is a strange white word.
No ice or frost
Have asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.(^13) Rosenberg, ‘Night and Day’, 56. (^14) Rosenberg, ‘Rudolph’, inCollected Works, 277.
(^15) Rosenberg to Gordon Bottomley, n.d. [postmarked 23 July 1916], ibid. 238.
(^16) Rosenberg, ‘Night and Day’, 56. (^17) Rosenberg, ‘God’, inPoems and Plays, 117.