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War and the Muses - Issac Rosenbrerg's "Break of Day in the Trenches"
Among the lesser known poets of the Great War, Issac Rosenberg (1890-1918) was born in Britain of Russian Jewish parents, and grew up in considerable privation in a London ghetto. He left school early to seek employment as an engraver’s apprentice. Rosenberg’s skill as a graphic artist earned him a scholarship to a prestigious art school, and he began to develop as a painter. Meanwhile he also evidenced a talent for poetry, and his first volume of verse appeared in 1912. Rosenberg, who suffered from chronic bronchitis, was in South Africa when the First World War broke out, and wrote “On Receiving News of the War,” a rather anti-war poem.
Despite his apparent anti-war attitude, in October of 1915, shortly after his second volume of verse appeared, his health having improved, the very short Rosenberg enlisted as a “bantam”, a special category for men under 5’3”, and was eventually assigned to the 11th (Service) Battalion of The King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment. Rosenberg served on the Western Front, and was killed while returning from a patrol into No Man’s Land around dawn on April 1, 1918, near Fampoux, north-east of Arras.
Break of Day in the Trenches The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
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.
It seems you inwardly 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
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.
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