‘for isaac rosenberg’ was to go ‘over the top slowly behind the stretcher parties|And,as a park attendant
where all hell had broken loose,|[Collect] littered limbs until his sack was heavy’.^61
In other cancelled lines of ‘No Man’s Land’, we see Longley’s struggle with this
obligation to be the gatherer and recorder of the odds and ends left out in No Man’s
Land. In the following, the poet stumbles across Rosenberg’s ‘identity disc’:
Must I be the looter, souvenir hunter,
Pickpocket of death out in No Man’s Land
Who spots among Lugers and brass buttons
His identity disc face down in the mud?^62Troubled by the omission of certain life stories from public and personal history,
and compelled to write such stories out, ‘No Man’s Land’ also implicates Longley’s
grandfather, who tells only ‘one story’ about his first wife Jessica—and that story
is ultimately much less about her than about him, in his rage, tossing the brick
through the neighbour’s window as his wife ‘lay dying’. Longley’s poem expresses
the tragedy of Jessica’s short life being reduced to a single story, her words modified
in the guts of the living husband.
More troubling still is the poem’s connection between the missing narrative and
the missing body. In this, Longley’s intention is clear: ‘Because your body was not
recovered either|I try to read the constellations of brass buttons’. In tilting Jessica’s
head towards Rosenberg, Longley not only affirms the corporeality of people
whose bodies have gone missing, but also envisions a more intimate connection
between the poet and his grandmother (in unpublished drafts of the poem the line
reads: ‘I would introduce her to Isaac Rosenberg’). By playing the matchmaker,
Longley imagines himself a familial as well as literary heir of Rosenberg. The silence
surrounding these figures from the past—Jessica Abrahams, Isaac Rosenberg, even
Longley’s father, who for a long time kept his experiences in the First World War to
himself^63 —compels Longley to ‘try’ to piece their stories (and their bodies) back
together. Not unlike the child-narrator in Seamus Deane’sReading in the Dark,
(^61) Longley, ‘Master of Ceremonies’, inCenotaph of Snow, 14.
(^62) Longley, Michael Longley archive.
(^63) Longley recalls: ‘Having lived through so much by the time he was thirty, perhaps my father
deserved his early partial retirement. At the age of seventeen he had enlisted in 1914, one of thousands
queuing up outside Buckingham Palace. He joined the London-Scottish by mistake and went into
battle wearing an unwarranted kilt. A Lady from Hell. Like somany survivors he seldom talked about
his experiences, reluctant to relive the nightmare. But not long before he died, we sat up late one
night and he reminisced. He had won the Military Cross for knocking out single-handed a German
machine-gun post and, later, the Royal Humane Society’s medal for gallantry: he had saved two nurses
from drowning. By the time he was twenty he had risen to the rank of Captain, in charge of a company
known as ‘‘Longley’s Babies’’ because many of them werenot yet regular shavers. He recalled the lice,
the rats, the mud, the tedium, the terror. Yes, he had bayoneted men and still dreamed about a tubby
little German who ‘‘couldn’t run fast enough. He turned around to face me and burst into tears.’’ My
father was nicknamed Squib in the trenches. For the rest of his life no-one ever called him Richard,
(Longley,Tu’penny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters(Belfast: Lagan Press, 1994), 18).