`A Wild Flower Planted Among Our Wheat'

Besides regulation gear, what does a soldier choose to carry in his knapsack? How does he balance burden and benefit? In October 1915, when Isaac Rosenberg headed for the Western Front, he packed two 17th-century volumes -- John Donne’s poems and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici. Born in Bristol, England, in 1890, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Rosenberg first read Donne in 1911, and the Metaphysical poet’s influence is already discernable in his pre-war poems. This defies conventional literary understanding, which assures us that Donne’s literary reputation was moribund before his post-war rehabilitation by T.S. Eliot, and that the Great War poets – Rosenberg, Owen, Sassoon, Sorley, Blunden and Thomas – were heirs to the Romantic tradition. Rosenberg embodies a premature literary tradition truncated before it could flourish. In a 2000 interview collected in In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland, Michael Longley says:

“Pound and Eliot are not among my favourite poets….How many people in the world actually enjoy them?…Really great English poets like Edward Thomas and Wildfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg who died in the trenches would have made it more difficult for Pound and Eliot, more complicated.…The war poems of Owen and Rosenberg ring out in my ear like modern versions of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Utterly modern. Huge. Who care if they’re `Modernist?’”

Longley is being provocative but not merely provocative. Pound is important but I suspect few actually enjoy his work. It’s more a matter of literary obligation, a rounding out of one’s literacy. Eliot is another story, but let’s concede Longley’s point. Had Rosenberg and the other Great War poets – especially Thomas – survived the slaughter, what we recognize today as Modernism might have worn a very different, more human face. Donne’s influence, via Rosenberg, and Keats’, via Owen and Sassoon, might have mutated into unimaginable forms. In an essay that appeared shortly before The Waste Land, Eliot claimed Donne and George Herbert “feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose. . . . A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” I detect something similar in Rosenberg and his poetic brothers in arms. In June 1916, Rosenberg wrote “Break of Day in the Trenches,” a poem that mingles whimsy and horror in a manner new to Western poetry, while recalling Donne’s “The Flea.” It was published the following December in the American journal Poetry:

“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.”

The “queer sardonic rat” with his “cosmopolitan sympathies” is a witty buffer against shell-shock and raw horror, and perhaps something of a self-portrait. In a letter he wrote from the front in the summer of 1916 to a friend in England, Rosenberg makes clear his feelings about “romantic” war poetry:

“I did not like Rupert Brooke’s begloried sonnets for the same reason. What I mean is second hand phrases `lambent fires’ etc takes from its reality and strength. It should be approached in a colder way, more abstract, with less of the million feelings everyone feels; or all these should be concentrated in one distinguished emotion. Walt Whitman in `Beat, drum, beat,’ has said the noblest thing on war.”

A long-time advocate for Rosenberg’s work is Geoffrey Hill. One of his first published poems, “For Isaac Rosenberg,” appeared in the journal Isis in 1952, when Hill was 20 and still a student at Keble College, Oxford:

“Princes dying with damp curls
In the accomplishment of fame
Keep, within the minds of girls,
A bright imperishable name –
And no one breaks upon their game.

“Yet men who mourn their hero's fall,
Laying him in tradition's bed –
With high-voiced chantings and the tall
Complacent candles at his head –
Still leave much carefully unsaid.

“When probing Hamlet was aware
That Death in a worn body lay
Cramped beneath the lobby-stair –
(Whose mystery was burnt away
Through the intensity of decay) –

“It followed, with ironic sense,
That he himself, who ever saw
Beneath the skin of all pretence,
Should have been carried from the floor
With shocked, tip-toeing drums before.

“With ceremony thin as this
We tidy death; make life as neat
As an unquiet Chrysalis
That is a symbol of defeat:
A worm in its own winding-sheet...”

Perhaps Hill is heir to several diverse traditions, in ways convention-minded critics don’t recognize. In “For Isaac Rosenberg,” we hear echoes of Donne, Shakespeare, Eliot and Rosenberg (for whom Eliot expressed public admiration). Rosenberg was killed near Arras, France, on April Fool’s Day, 1918, while on dawn patrol. He was 27 and his body was never recovered. Edward Thomas had been killed nearby almost one year earlier. I’m reminded of something Michael Oakeshott wrote in one of his rare ventures into literary matters. This is from “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind”:

“Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.”