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 vivien noakes

destroyed both bud and bird. Then the song of the larks will be silenced, and shells
bringingdeath will drop effortlessly, casually from the dark.
In ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ we can see—as well as vivid, powerful images of war
and war’s futility—both Rosenberg’s sense of exile and his understanding of
man’s nobility and tenderness as he confronts the horror of the forces that are so
carelessly destroying him. Its title speaks of the casualness of the disposal of the
dead, but the poem itself reveals the nobility of men who must daily confront this
thoughtless abandonment. It expresses the mystery of sudden, violent death with a
deep compassion:

A man’s brains splattered on

A stretcher-bearer’s face;

His shook shoulders slipped their load,

But when they bent to look again

The drowning soul was sunk too deep

For human tenderness.^33

Into this violence, where the air is loud with death as shells go crying over the
shrieking pyre, comes a stanza of absolute stillness:

None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,

Or stood aside for the half used life to pass

Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

Man’s days are as grass, and as the wind passes over it, it is gone.^34 They leave no
trace behind, and it is the very creator of the sweetness of their youth who has
destroyed them.
The third and fourth stanzas were initially a separate poem entitled ‘The Young
Dead’. They place the inevitability of the death within a context that transcends the
war itself:

Earth has waited for them

All the time of their growth

Fretting for their decay:

Now she has them at last!

In the strength of their strength

Suspended—stopped and held.

Now the earth can reclaim the strong young bodies that will soon, like the other,
older dead, be burnt black by strange decay. But what of man’s noblest, most
enduring, aspect?

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit

Earth! have they gone into you?

(^33) Rosenberg, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, 139–42. (^34) Cf. Ps. 103: 15–16.