The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg: A Critical Edition (Oxford English Texts)

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The collected poems of Isaac Rosenberg. The collected poems of Isaac Rosenberg by Isaac Rosenberg Out of Print--Limited Availability. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Having turned back to his racial mythology he found it was rich in themes closely related to his own experiences, as his poem "The Burning of the Temple" shows: Rosenberg uses the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian hordes again, in a poem of that title, to illustrate the carnage around him: Sweet laughter charred in the flame That clutched the cloud and earth, While Solomon's towers crashed between The gird of Babylon's mirth.

In February , he was transferred yet again, this time to the 1st King's Own Royal Lancasters, and recalled to the trenches in March. In the great spring German offensive, the main attack was launched against the British Third and Fifth Armies and as part of the Third Army, Rosenberg's battalion had been brought into the front line by March For three days they helped ward off the enemy, then were sent back into reserve. Two days later the Germans broke through to capture land they had not occupied since During the ensuing battle, Rosenberg was killed on patrol by a German raiding-party at dawn on April Fool's Day, In a letter to Marsh four days before his death he had written: I must measure my letter by the light.

Isaac Rosenberg's insignificant military career and unlucky end were sadly all too common in the first world war and would not be of any special interest had he not emerged as one of the most powerful poets of that war. His attitude towards the conflict into which he had been so unwillingly drawn is of prime importance to an understanding of his work. His initial response to the war in had been fairly conventional, as his poem "The Dead Heroes" shows: He was critical of Rupert Brooke's "begloried sonnets", which seemed to him "commonplace", finding their romantic lyricism inappropriate to the ugliness and horror he encountered in wartime France.

Like Owen, Sassoon, Sorley and Graves, among others, he judged the old reactions and techniques inadequate.

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Unlike those officer poets, however, Rosenberg saw war from a private soldier's point of view. Though not unique in this, it does give his work an unusual angle, which helps to distinguish it from the bulk of first world war poetry. In "Marching As Seen from the Left File ", for instance, he describes the men from the perspective of one of them and in "Break of Day in the Trenches" he identifies with the lowly rat against the "haughty athletes".

Being a private meant Rosenberg led a harder life than the officer-poets while not having to suffer their strong sense of responsibility and, in Sassoon's case at least, guilt. He was also less privileged in terms of leave; he served almost 20 months in or near the trenches with only two brief respites. For him war became an everyday experience of such rigour that he had little time to theorise about it, much less beautify it. Such conditions may also help to explain why Rosenberg's work often has a more visceral quality than that of the officer-poets: While recognising that ideally the poet should "wait on ideas, you cannot coax real ones to you and let as it were a skin grow naturally round and through them", as Rosenberg wrote to Marsh, he was forced through circumstances "when the ideas come hot" to "seize them with the skin in tatters, raw, crude, in some parts beautiful in others monstrous".

He was determined, he told Binyon, "that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting," but feared that going into the army had retarded his development as a poet. I can only give my personal and if you like selfish point of view that I, feeling myself in the prime and vigour of my powers whatever they may be , have no more free will than a tree; seeing with helpless clear eyes the utter destruction of the railways and avenues of approaches to outer communication cut off. Being by the nature of my upbringing, all my energies having been directed to one channel of activity, crippled from other activities and made helpless even to live.

It is true I have not been killed or crippled, been a loser in the stocks, or had to forswear my fatherland, but I have not quite gone free and have a right to say something. Anyone schooled on sepia anthologies of Siegfried Sassoon's rearguard actions and Wilfred Owen's desperate glory will probably be reluctant to open another book of first world war poems, or "dread tales and red yarns" as Ivor Gurney called them.

Almost years on, the first world war is now a no-man's land of television documentaries, greatcoats, white feathers and national curriculum requirements. When I was young, every small town still had its own gang of veterans wearing berets and playing tiddlywinks in local pubs. Now they're all ghosts. But listen to this, rising up from the lips of a ghoul: The poem, written in , when Isaac Rosenberg was still in his teens, is excited, frantic and damp and sticky with poesy, and in it are all the elements for which he might properly be remembered: Rosenberg was born, the son of Russian immigrants, in Bristol in and brought up in Stepney, in east London.

He left school at 14 to train as an apprentice engraver, at Hentschel's in Fleet Street, but he really wanted to be an artist, like his hero William Blake. He managed to take evening classes at the art school at Birkbeck College, and in , when he was 21, some wealthy Jewish ladies clubbed together to pay for him to be able to study at the Slade School of Art. The world in which Rosenberg was now moving was quite different to the world in which he'd grown up: Roger Fry lectured on modernism, about which Rosenberg wasn't fully convinced: He associated not just with artists but also with the poet Laurence Binyon and with Edward Marsh.

A civil servant who was later to become private secretary to Winston Churchill , Marsh edited the volumes of Georgian Poetry. As well as his painting, Rosenberg was busy writing poems. His early work, as one might expect, is thrusting, ambitious, and not always very good. There's a lot of adolescent and animistic yearning to assimilate into organic and elemental processes.

A lot of the poems are sublimations of awakening sexual desire. The whole world around him is writhing in passion: In another early poem, "Summer's lips are aglow". Throughout these early poems Rosenberg is desperate to connect "The world rustles by me - let me heed. Alas, he was vouchsafed no such vision - no glory, no gold, and no glamour. Instead what he got was this: His poetry longed for rapture: His first war poem, "On Receiving News of the War", written while he was visiting his sister in South Africa in , seems to sniff out the calamity about to overcome him: The vast, benevolent orchestrating Nature of the early poems suddenly becomes a personal, spiteful malicious God, and Rosenberg turns from the worship of the female to hatred for the Father.

After the rounded forms and structures of his early verse, he now finds himself struggling for words: Rats feature again in Rosenberg's most famous poem, "Break of Day in the Trenches", a "queer sardonic rat", a "droll" rat with "cosmopolitan sympathies" crawling round the trenches. One may perhaps wish to compare this with Eliot's much more famous rats, in "Burbank with a Baedaker: Bleistein with a Cigar", written a few years later "The rats are underneath the piles. Ezra Pound, a writer, like Eliot, with opinions about free-thinking Jews, and one of the great dark shadows over the development of English poetry, was predictably patronising about Rosenberg.

It was in , when Pound was living off his wife's income in Kensington and starting work on his Cantos - "I was not writing for money," he later recalled, "so they had no means of crushing me" - and Eliot was working on his thesis on FH Bradley at Merton College, Oxford, and getting married to Vivien Haigh-Wood, that Rosenberg signed up to go and fight in the war.

Because he needed the money. Desperate, passionate, gauche, self-educated, deeply religious, sceptical of modernism and yet profoundly modern in spirit, a man possessed, according to his friend Binyon, "of vivid enthusiasms", and having to snatch his working time in difficult circumstances "It is only when we get a bit of rest and the others might be gambling or squabbling I add a line or two, and continue this way" , Rosenberg should be acknowledged not perhaps as a great English poet, but at least as something typical.

He was killed on patrol on April fool's day A few days earlier he wrote to his friend Marsh about "my being lucky enough to bag an inch of candle that incites me to this pitch of punctual epistolary. I must measure my letter by the light". The poems and plays of Isaac Rosenberg. Edited by Vivien Noakes. It is true that his best poems, which are also the best known, came from his life as a soldier on the Western Front: But while battle provided the occasion for that astonishing handful of works, it was not exactly their cause: If he is to be counted among the war poets at all, then, he must be an unusual case, and it may not be so surprising that he has always kept an unostentatious profile among that company.

A succession of editions, of which this handsome and scrupulous volume is the crowning achievement, have made good that near-oblivion; but still it would not be wrong to see Rosenberg enduring, or enjoying, a kind of obscurity or marginality: The sense of living peripherally was also to do with class: At fourteen, he was apprenticed to a firm of engravers, a job he hated, where he kept himself sane by reading the Romantic poets and by painting.

He was evidently full of promise and, once the apprenticeship was done, he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, thanks to the generosity of three Jewish women who paid his tuition fees. But despite his obvious accomplishment, especially as a portrait painter, and some success in selling work, he doubted his capacity to make good the damage of so wrong a start: The expressions of inadequacy voice genuine fears about coming from outside and coming too late, but they also capture a kind of pawky intransigence: Relations with patrons were often prickly.

The independence that he longed for was close kin to the isolation that he endured: This feeling gets couched in the earliest verse in a language drawn from Shelley and Keats, Rossetti and Swinburne, a poetry of fleetingly numinous visitation which does not always avoid a cumbersome sort of late Romantic portentousness: But the saving influence most unusually is Blake: Who has made of the forest a park?

Who has changed the wolf to a dog? And put the horse in harness? The verse play Moses , from which those lines come, entertains a thoroughly Blakean hope in revolution: But the play is less resolved than the will of its hero: And it is with this voice that the poet-within-the-poem, an aged minstrel, also sings: Like Blake, Rosenberg was an instinctively mythical poet who reinvented Biblical stories to make new myths of his own.

To think in terms of myth in this way is to do more than make a decision about idiom: The fall into self-division that Blake describes is not just something that happened in prehistory to Urizen but something that happens every time your child sits down to do algebra or stands up to sing a hymn. Richard Ellman has an anecdote in his biography of Joyce, another innately mythical writer, that illuminates the point.

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A squib of a fragment printed here reads: I should advise - its such a boring tale,. That is the Mosaic ambition, to be sure, and Rosenberg was not deaf to its appeal, though he could not often bring himself whole-heartedly to endorse it. Rosenberg, unlike his Moses, was not a man of heroic gestures - which is not to say that he was a man of unheroic gestures either, but that he was hardly a man of gestures at all: Drop, and are ever dropping,.

But mine in my ear is safe —. Just a little white with the dust. The poise of feelings here is wonderful: Her commentary is a model of erudite discretion; she has corrected many things and made good many dates; the presentation of variants is beautifully lucid, and the text as a whole a pleasure to read. The death of the scholarly edition is often announced, usually with a nod towards the internet: I confess a private dismay: The Sunday Times review by John Carey: The Making of a Great War Poet: Which of all the British poets came from the most deprived background?

Almost certainly the correct answer is Isaac Rosenberg, who was born into a family of Yiddish-speaking Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in His father was a pedlar; his mother took in washing and sold fancy needlework. The first London home they found for themselves and their five children was a single room behind a rag-and-bone shop in Tower Hamlets.

Later they moved to a ground-floor and basement in Whitechapel. Like many slum children, Isaac grew up stunted and with a weak chest. He started school aged eight, unable to read or write English, but reached the required grade in the three Rs within a year, and moved to one of the board schools established under the Education Act.

In effect, it was a Jewish school within the state system, and he learnt some Hebrew and Old Testament history. But the education was basic at best no foreign languages, no music and he had to leave to earn his living at 14, getting a job in an etching workshop, which he hated. His literary and artistic gifts became apparent early on. His sisters remember him writing poems in bed by the light of a candle, and sketching complete strangers on street corners.

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His studio was the kitchen table, littered with cups and plates. By the time he was 11, he had become an accomplished watercolourist, and efforts began to be made on his behalf, driven by community spirit, family solidarity and an earnest belief in education - all of them things we seem to have abandoned. He tried reading them his poems, but they bombarded him with paper pellets, and when he lent some of them his studio they smashed it up in a fit of high jinks.

He made friends with the painters David Bomberg and Mark Gertler and, together with the poet and publisher John Rodker and the dancer and actress Sonia Cohen, they formed the nucleus of what became known as the Whitechapel Group. Jewish, educated at board schools, and forced to work long hours at menial jobs, they were, as Jean Moorcroft Wilson points out, the polar opposite of the privileged and largely anti-semitic Bloomsbury Group.

Her biography of Rosenberg is admiring and devotedly researched, yet critical of his character. She finds him self-pitying, defiant, difficult to help, and ungrateful to his patrons. But is pride to be reserved for the wealthy? Rosenberg's refusal to be obsequious was part of his indomitable self-belief. No doubt it disadvantaged him financially. In the nine months he spent in South Africa, staying with his sister Minnie, he was taken up for a time by well-heeled members of the novelist and political activist Olive Schreiner's circle.

He got a commission to paint a leading Cape Town businessman, but chucked it on the grounds that his sitter looked too prosperous. That might be viewed as foolish, or alternatively as the index of a free spirit, and of a conviction that art is only soiled by association with great wealth.

The same independence distinguished his army career. He joined up not out of patriotism, since he felt none, but because the army would clothe and feed him, as writing and painting had failed to do, and would enable him to send half his pay home to his mother. Unlike the more famous war poets, he did not become an officer.

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Posted at first to a Bantam battalion, for men under 5ft 3in in height, he moved fairly rapidly from unit to unit, accompanied by complaints that he was unsoldierly and neglectful of his duties, which was another way of saying that he had the courage to resist the military machine. He showed his intransigence in his poetry, as in all else.

Even his friends and admirers were daunted by its obscurities and contortions, which sometimes suggest an imperfect grasp of English usage. Yet he could also write with brilliant clarity, as in Break of Day in the Trenches, which Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory selected as the greatest poem to come out of that monstrous slaughter. The perfect corollary of this poem is the self-portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery, which gives a quizzical, confident, sideways glance at us, and the mess we have made of our world. It is only one of a marvellous series of portraits in oils, pencil and other media, not just of himself but of his father, his sister, Sonia Cohen, and of the actress Marda Vanne with whom he may have had a brief affair in Cape Town.

He went on doing drawings of himself when he was at the front. One, in black chalk on brown wrapping paper, shows him in an elegant-looking steel helmet. He was killed by a German raiding party at dawn on April 1, His body was never found. The headstone in the Bailleul Road East military cemetery in France stands over an empty grave. Moorcroft Wilson's account, incorporating new findings, is the fullest we are ever likely to get of his life. But even if it were less full it would be well worth buying for its splendid reproductions of his drawings and paintings, many of them now unviewable in private hands, which proclaim his unique genius even more distinctly than his words.

East End to Western Front. Reviewed by Ken Worpole. Friday, 16 May In May the doors of the Whitechapel Library, the street-corner university of so many East End Jewish writers and artists, closed for the last time. Bernard Kops wrote a poem, remembering that "The door of the library was the door into me.

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Of all those who flourished under the care of the dedicated librarians and curators of these cherished institutions, none led a more bifurcated and poignant life than Isaac Rosenberg, who died in the trenches at Arras in , aged Though this new study covers many of the same climactic periods of Rosenberg's "half-used life" detailed in Jean Liddiard's admired biography of , it confirms that Rosenberg's poetry, though stylistically different to that of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other poets of the First World War, has proved equally enduring.

As a painter, Rosenberg exhibited an equal talent, as the haunting self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery reveals. He was adept in self-portraits, for while he could not afford to pay models, his tenement home at least had a mirror. Wilson's book is particularly good on his early painting ambitions, providing a sympathetic description of Rosenberg's time at the Slade, where fellow students included David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer.

Few artists or writers were able to develop their talent in those days without the support of mentors and patrons, and Rosenberg was aided by a variety of people. The critic FR Leavis later claimed that Rosenberg and Lawrence exhibited a common "radical and religious" interest in life. Like many other members of the Whitechapel Group, Rosenberg lived in two separate worlds. While occasionally mixing with aristocratic patrons in West End salons and galleries, he was more often to be found wandering the streets of Stepney in the company of Jewish friends and comrades, making night-time forays into Epping Forest, the one true arcadia of east London.

Dawn and dusk were favourite times, when the everyday world seemed transfigured. Much of Rosenberg's poetry was considered difficult, employing a personal repertoire of religious and mythological imagery. It was a far cry from the quietist Georgian poetry of the time. Yiddish was Rosenberg's first language; he did not learn English until he went to school. This bilingualism, critics claim, accounts for his unusual syntax and vocabulary. Wilson rightly dwells on the reasons why the small and sickly Rosenberg, a pacifist by temperament, enlisted in the Army.

He suffered all his life from chronic bronchitis. The principal reason, she suggests, was to provide a regular allowance for his mother's upkeep. Life in the Army was thoroughly miserable: Once in France, as a front-line soldier and occasional stretcher-bearer, he finally descended into a hell of mud, slurry and unburied corpses, which made him write in a letter to Marsh on 26 January It is breaking me completely. These extreme conditions, and a lack of time for self-doubt, produced the great poems such as "Dead Man's Dump", "Louse Hunting", "Returning We Hear The Larks" and "Break of Day in the Trenches", in which his apocalyptic imagery meshed perfectly with the grim detail of the rats, the poppies, and the squelching of the limber carts as they rolled over the bodies of the dead.

There were over , Jews living in the East End in Rosenberg's time, and the area teemed with poverty, but also with political radicalism and artistic ambition. All this is well captured in Wilson's generous life of the unhappy, but richly talented, poet and painter who, while conscious of his own abilities, was continually frustrated in life and claimed he had "no more free will than a tree".

Dead Man's Dump The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear. God In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.

On Receiving News of the War Snow is a strange white word. Louse Hunting Nudes -- stark and glistening, Yelling in lurid glee. The Jew Moses, from whose loins I sprung, Lit by a lamp in his blood Ten immutable rules, a moon For mutable lampless men. The Immortals I killed them, but they would not die. Through These Pale Cold Days Through these pale cold days What dark faces burn Out of three thousand years, And their wild eyes yearn, While underneath their brows Like waifs their spirits grope For the pools of Hebron again-- For Lebanon's summer slope.