vivien noakes
I spoke of Rosenberg’s belief—expressed in many of his pre-war poems—that
man’sexistence is one of exile, and how he saw, in the darkness of night, when the
senses shut down and the eyes of the soul were opened, an escape from his quotidian
banishment. In this vision there are the border states of dawn and twilight, and it
is in one of these that he places his poem ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, written
in June 1916 during one of his first tours in the line. Here, the darkness of night
is giving way to the inevitability of day, ‘the same old Druid Time as ever’.^29 We
know from his earlier work that as dawn breaks he is bringing us back into the
world of imprisoned exile; but now a new, more violent, form of imprisonment has
been added to the old. He is no longer tidily caged in earth: now he is ‘Sprawled in
the bowels of the earth,|The torn fields of France’. His companion, who leaps as
he pulls the parapet’s poppy—a poppy ‘whose roots are in man’s veins’, already a
symbol of transience and eventually of course of the fallen of the war—is his old
adversary, sardonic, bitter, scornful, the God whose ‘body lodged a rat where men
nursed souls’ and who taunts both friend and foe:
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.Man may believe himself to be superior to the rat—and, indeed, to the malign
godhead—but it is the rat who has the freedom to move while the soldier is trapped
in his trench. And as it moves, it seems to revel not only in the breaking of strong
youngbodiesonwhich,intime,itwillfeast,butalsointheterroritcanseeinthe
eyes of the men who are condemned to die:
It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurl’d through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?But for now the rat, and its feasting, must wait. Though death, and the return to
earth, are as inevitable as the dropping of the petals of the poppy, at daybreak that
earth is no more than a white dusting in the half-light of dawn. It is a portent, for
in Rosenberg whiteness is synonymous with death.
In ‘Returning, we hear the larks’—written in the following year, 1917—we have
moved from dawn into night, but this is no longer the time of spiritual awakening
(^29) Rosenberg, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, inPoems and Plays, 128–9.