Isaac Rosenberg Poems

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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 ***** 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...Read more of this...

Dead Mans 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.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched;
Their shut mouths made no moan,
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and...Read more of this...

God

 In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed...Read more of this...

In the Trenches

 I snatched two poppies 
From the parapet’s ledge, 
Two bright red poppies 
That winked on the ledge. 
Behind my ear 
I stuck one through, 
One blood red poppy 
I gave to you. 

The sandbags narrowed 
And screwed out our jest, 
And tore the poppy 
You had on your breast ... 
Down - a shell - O! Christ, 
I am...Read more of this...

Louse Hunting

 Nudes -- stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a...Read more of this...

On Receiving News of the War

 Snow is a strange white word.
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter's cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know.
No man knows why.

In all men's hearts it is.
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face.
God's blood is shed.
He mourns from His lone place
His children...Read more of this...

Returning We Hear the Larks

 Sombre the night is. 
And though we have our lives, we know 
What sinister threat lies there. 

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know 
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp - 
On a little safe sleep. 

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy. 
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks. 
Music showering our upturned list’ning faces....Read more of this...

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 blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,
With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses.
Then why do they sneer at me?...Read more of this...

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.

They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead....Read more of this...