Isaac Rosenberg

“ Recoiled, as anguish-smitten by sharp sword,
Grieving such body's dole.
Then grief gave place
To a strange pulsing rapture as she spoke;
For I could catch the glimpses of God's grace,
And a desire awoke
To take this trust
And warm and gladden it with love's new fires,
Burning the past to ashes and to dust
Through purified desires.
We walked our way,
One way hewn for us from the birth of Time;
For we had wandered into Love's strange clime
Through ways sin waits to slay.
Love's euphony,
In Love's own temple that is our glad hearts,
Makes now long music wild deliciously ”

“ Moses!
Moses
You drunken rascal!
Abinoah
A drunken rascal! Isis, hear the Prince!
Drunken with duty, and he calls me rascal.
Moses
You may think it your duty to get drunk;
But get yourself bronze claws before
You would be impudent.
Abinoah
When a mans drunk he'll kiss a horse or king,
He's so affectionate. Under your words
There is strong wine to make me drunk; you think,
The lines of all your face say, "Her father, Koelue's father."
Moses
This is too droll and extraordinary. ”

“ Solidity as human life can be:
So grandly fashion these rude elements
Into some newer nature, a consciousness
Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul,
Oppressing with its gorgeous tyranny
Until they take it thus—or die.
[While speaking, he places his hand on the unsuspecting Egyptian's head and gently, caressingly, pulls his hair back until his chin is above his forehead, and holds him so till he is suffocated. In the darkness ahead is seen the glimmer of javelins and spears: it is Prince Imra’s cohorts come to arrest Moses.] ”

“ Winter is not the least of the horrors of war. I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting; that is, if I am lucky enough to come through all right. I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on. I have thoughts of a play round our Jewish hero, Judas Maccabeus. I have much real material here, and also there is some parallel in the savagery of the invaders then to this war. ”

“ WILLIAM HEINEMANN vYouth is still childhood: when we cast off every cloudy vesture, and our thoughts are clear and mature; when every act is a conscious thought, every thought an attempt to arrest feeling; our feelings strong and overwhelming, our sensitiveness awakened by insignificant things in life; when the skies race tumultuously with our blood, and the earth shines and laughs; when our blood hangs suspended at the rustling of a gown. Our vanity loves to subdue—battle, aggressive. How we despise those older and duller—we want life, newness, excitement. ”

“ Nubian
None can exceed their limit, lady:
You either bear or break.
Lilith
Can one choose to break? To bear,
Wearily to bear, is misery.
Beauty is this corroding malady.
Nubian
Beauty is a great paradox—
Music's secret soul creeping about the senses
To wrestle with man's coarser nature.
It is hard when beauty loses.
Lilith
I think beauty is a bad bargain made of life. ”

“ Like every generous and ambitious youth, Rosenberg wished his own generation to do glorious things, and wished to belong to it as a comrade. Whether he would have emerged and found himself as a painter is a doubtful conjecture. I think it possible that he would have abandoned painting. For his true vocation was poetry, and he thought of himself as a poet rather than as a painter. ”

“ As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah?
Young Hebrew
Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil
Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood,
Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me,
He came by and bore me into the shade:
O, what a furnace roaring in his blood
Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own
Raging through me like a strong cordial.
He spoke! Since yesterday
Am I not larger grown?
I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul,
Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence
They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight,
And to their shop only heroes come ”

“ We had a rough time in the trenches with the mud, but now we're out for a bit of a rest, and I will try and write longer letters. You must know by now what a rest behind the line means. I can call the evenings—that is, from tea to lights out—my own; but there is no chance whatever for seclusion or any hope of writing poetry now. Sometimes I give way and am appalled at the devastation this life seems to have made in my nature. It seems to have blunted me. I seem to be powerless to compel my will to any direction, and all I do is without energy and interest. ”

“ And reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure,
No softer lure than the savage ways of death.
We were satisfied of our lords the moon and the sun
To take our wage of sleep and bread and warmth—
These maidens came—these strong everliving Amazons,
And in an easy might their wrists
Of night's sway and noon's sway the sceptres brake,
Clouding the wild, the soft lustres of our eyes. ”

“ THE IMMORTALS
I killed them, but they would not die.
Yea, all the day and all the night
For them I could not rest nor sleep,
Nor guard from them nor hide in flight!
Then in my agony I turned
And made my hands red in their gore.
In vain—for faster than I slew
They rose more cruel than before.
I killed and killed with slaughter mad;
I killed till all my strength was gone;
And still they rose to torture me,
For Devils only die for fun.
I used to think the Devil hid
In women's smiles and wine's carouse;
I called him Satan, Balzebub;
But now I call him dirty louse. ”

“ A storm comes on, the mules break down, and by the lightning be sees the Unicorn race by; a naked black like an apparition rises up and easily lifts the wheels from the rut, and together they ride to Saul's hut. ”

“ Of wonder at the light
(Our life-leased home) ,
Of greeting to our housemates. And in might
Our song shall roam
Life's heart, a blossoming fire
Blown bright by thought,
While gleams and fades the infinite desire,
Phantasmed naught. ”

“ Moses
[To Messenger.] What is the edict?
Messenger
The royal paunch of Pharaoh dangled worriedly,
Not knowing where the wrong: viands once giant-like
Came to him thin and thinner—what rats gnawed?
Honor, the swarm of slaves! The satraps swore
Their wives' bones hurt them when they lay abed,
That before were soft and plump: the people howled
They'd boil the slaves three days to get their fat,
Ending the famine. ”

“ I have tried to make some sort of self-adjustment to circumstances by saying, ‘It is all experience’; but, good God! it is all experience, and nothing else.... I really would like to take up painting seriously; I think I might do something at that; but poetry—I despair of ever writing excellent poetry. I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do. My mind is so cramped and dulled and fevered, there is no consistency of purpose, no oneness of aim ”

“ The imaginative conceptions and the frequent gleam of imaginative phrasing should be equally apparent. But what does not appear on the surface is the fine intention, the ardent toil, and the continual self-criticism which underlay his work. Rosenberg’s aim was, in his own words, a kind of poetry “where an interesting complexity of thought is kept in tone and right value to the dominating idea so that it is understandable and still ungraspable.” ”

“ Moses
A boy at college flattered so by a girl
Will give her what she asks for.
Abinoah
Osiris! Burning Osiris!
Of thee desirable, for thee, her hair....
[He looks inanely at Moses, saying to himself.]
Prince Imra vowed his honey-hives and vineyards:
Isis, to let a Jew have her for nothing!
[He sings under his breath.]
Night by night in a little house
A man and woman meet;
They look like each other,
They are sister and brother;
And night by night at that same hour
A king calls for his son in vain.
Moses
[To himself.] ”

“ So I’ve decided on Africa, the climate being very good, and I believe plenty to do.... I won’t be quite lost in Africa.... I dislike London for the selfishness it instils into one, which is a reason of the peculiar feeling of isolation I believe most people have in London. I hardly know anybody whom I would regret leaving (except, of course, the natural ties of sentiment with one’s own people) ; but whether it is that my nature distrusts people, or is intolerant, or whether my pride or my backwardness cools people, I have always been alone. ”

“ He'll hunt through wards of Heaven,
Call to uncoffined earth
"Where is this soul, unjudged, not given
Dole for good's dearth?"
And I, lying so safe
Within you, hearing all,
To have cheated God shall laugh,
Freed by your thrall. ”

“ If only this war were over our eyes would not be on death so much: it seems to underlie even our underthoughts. Yet when I have been so near to it as anybody could be, the idea has never crossed my mind, certainly not so much as when some lying doctor told me I had consumption. I like to think of myself as a poet ”

“ Not to talk is to waste words....
"To most people life is a musical instrument on which they are unable to play: but in the musician's hands it becomes a living thing.... The artist can see beauty everywhere, anywhere...."
In what is perhaps an earlier letter he excuses his neglect of serious reading by his lack of leisure and the worries that make him crave for amusing books as an antidote:
"You mustn't forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had. Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way. ”

“ All one's thoughts seem to revolve round to one point—death. It is horrible, especially at night, 'in the silence of the midnight'; it seems to clutch at your thought—you can't breathe. Oh, I think, work, work, any work, only to stop one thinking. ”

“ DON JUAN'S SONG
The moon is in an ecstasy,
It wanes not nor can grow;
The heavens are in a mist of love,
And deepest knowledge know:
What things in nature seem to move
Bear love as I bear love? ”

“ Dragging the sun across the shell of thought;
A web threaded with fading fire;
Futile and fragile lure, a July ghost
Standing with feet of fire on banks of ice,
My frozen heart, the summer cannot reach—
Hidden as a root from air, or star from day,
A frozen pool whereon mirth dances,
Where the shining boys would fish. To Edward Marsh (1914) . ”

“ I have left all my poems, including a short drama, with a friend, and I will write to him for them, when I shall send them either direct to Abercrombie or to you first. I believe in myself more as a poet than a painter; I think I get more depth into my writing. I have only taken Donne with me, and don’t feel for poetry much in this wretched place. There is not a book or paper here; we are not allowed to stir from the gate, have little to eat, and are not allowed to buy any if we have money, and are utterly wretched. ”

“ And all her soft dark hair
Breathed for him like a prayer,
And her white lost face
Was prisoned to some far place.
Love was not denied—
Love's ends would hide,
And flower and fruit and tree
Were under its sea. ”

“ Most people can only see and hear the noisy sunsets, mountains and waterfalls; but the delicate greys and hues, the star in the puddle, the quiet sailing cloud, is nothing to them. Of course, I only mean this metaphorically, as distinguishing between obvious experiences and the almost imperceptible. I still have no work to do. I think, if nothing turns up here, I will go to Africa. I could not endure to live upon my people ”