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 vivien noakes

Yet ice and frost and snow

Fromearth to sky

This Summer land doth know.

No man knows why.^18

There are stages in this coming. As the snow stands in isolated passivity, it is the
word, with its suggestion of untouched purity, that Rosenberg emphasizes. But
this innocence does not last. With the arrival of ice and frost comes the harshness
that was always there, waiting. The word ‘asked’ suggests that bud and bird have a
choice, that winter’s cost is not inevitable. But that is an illusion; with their coming
the whiteness that had seemed benign combines to create a blanket of winter that
will destroy those symbols of promise and freedom as it reaches out to envelop the
earth.
In the third and fourth stanzas he turns from a scene of encompassing whiteness
to the blood-red atavism that hides beneath the kiss of betrayal. Here God is still
able to mourn for his creation; he is not yet the malevolent power he is soon to
become in his poetry:

In all men’s hearts it is.

Some spirit old

Hath turned with malign kiss

Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face.

God’s blood is shed.

He mourns from His lone place

His children dead.

But then, in the final stanza, he seems to suggest that the war itself will offer the
possibility of redemption, as man’s bellicosity turns to create a purging, purifying
power that will cleanse and re-create the world:

O! ancient crimson curse!

Corrode, consume.

Give back this universe

Its pristine bloom.

This was an image that represented for him the urgency and vitality that he both
celebrated and mistrusted in the new art of Marinetti and the Futurists. ‘Art is now,
as it were a volcano’, he wrote in 1914. ‘The roots of a dead universe are torn up
by hands, feverish and consuming with an exuberant vitality—and amid dynamic
threatenings we watch the hastening of the corroding doom,’ adding wistfully, ‘the
reign of Blake is yet to begin’.^19 His own role as an artist will be different. As
Europe steps into its bath of blood, he ‘will be waiting with beautiful drying towels

(^18) Rosenberg, ‘On Receiving News of the War: Cape Town’, ibid. 83–4.
(^19) Rosenberg, ‘Art’, inCollected Works, 294.