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war poetry, or the poetry of war? 

that he had once welcomed. At the Front, darkness brought with it the constant
threatof death, particularly from the shelling of those going into or coming out of
the line:

Sombre the night is.

And though we have our lives, we know

What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know

This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—

On a little safe sleep.^30

The sinister threat is reminiscent of the Judas kiss that presaged war. But then,
suddenly, it all changes. The mood is shattered by a beauty that pours from the
night sky, that music of joy that we find so often in his poetry, speaking directly to
exiled man and sustaining him in his suffering:

But hark! joy—joy—strange joy.

Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.

Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.

This is the beauty, ‘music’s secret soul|Creeping about man’s senses’,^31 that he
writes of in ‘The Unicorn’, the poetic play on which he was working in France
at this same time, a play in which he wanted to put all his innermost experience
‘to symbolize the war and all the devastating forces let loose by an ambitious and
unscrupulous will’.^32
Then comes the poem’s final stanza as his wonder at this beauty fades into a
realization of inevitability:

Death could drop from the dark

As easily as song—

But song only dropped,

Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand

By dangerous tides,

Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,

Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

The beauty of the music of the unseen larks, though real, is also an illusion: the
song of birds may fill the sky, but it will not always be so. Just as the winter snow in
‘On Receiving News of the War’ turns from innocence to destruction, so will those
tides engulf the man who does not know that they are there, and the serpent ruin
the trusting girl. For now they may dream, but inevitably will come that betrayal
which is the certain consequence of unguarded innocence, that reality which earlier

(^30) Rosenberg, ‘Returning, we hear the larks’, ibid. 138–9.
(^31) Rosenberg, ‘The Unicorn’, ibid. 253.
(^32) Rosenberg to Miss Seaton, n.d. [8 Mar. 1918], inCollected Works, 270.