A Look Into Lesser Known Poets, A Series, (1.) Isaac Rosenberg - Robert Lindley's Blog

Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890 in Bristol, the son of Lithuanian Jews who had moved to Britain a few years earlier. As a child, his teachers noticed his talent for drawing and writing poetry, but his parents couldn’t afford to keep him at school, and so he was apprenticed to an engraver’s company in 1905. In spite of this, Rosenberg attending evening classes in painting and drawing, and in the early 1910s a wealthy Jewish woman offered to pay his fees to attend art school. Before the war started he published two volumes of poems, one called Night and Day, and another Youth. Despite being resolutely pacifist, he enlisted for the war in 1915 – and wrote many poems while he was in the fighting until his death in 1918.
Image shows a lark sitting on a mossy branch.

Rosenberg contrasts the innocent song of birdsong with the horror of war.

In perhaps his best-known poem, ‘Returning, we hear the larks’, Rosenberg plays with the idea that the dread, foreboding and ultimate violent destruction of war has poisoned all of nature. The innocent song of larks in the dark is a pure, beautiful and strange comfort – but it is everywhere underlain with the threat that bullets, gas, and death might rain out of the night and onto the soldiers. The images of weightlessness and insubstantiality that pervade the final stanza: ‘a blind man’s dreams’ dropped on the sand by a violent sea, or the hair of a girl, are ultimately reversed, replaced in the final line by an image of a kiss that seems soft and light but conceals the poison of a snake:

Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks 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 on our upturned list’ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
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Isaac Rosenberg
Poet Details
1890–1918

Isaac Rosenberg may be remembered as a Jewish-English poet, or a poet of war, but his poetry stretches beyond those narrow categories. Since Rosenberg was only twenty-eight when he died, most critics have tended to treat his corpus as a promising but flawed start, and they wonder if he would have become a great poet had he lived. Rosenberg's status as an English poet is thus still debated: he was a Jewish poet, he was an English poet; he was a war poet, he was a painter-poet; he was a young poet; he was a great poet and a minor poet. In his brief career, Rosenberg created a small selection of poems and a great many questions.

Rosenberg was born on November 25, 1890 in Bristol. His parents, Dovber "Barnett" Rosenberg and Hacha "Hannah" Davidov Rosenberg, were Jewish immigrants from Russia. During Rosenberg's childhood, they moved into the squalid streets of London's Jewish ghetto, and there set up a butcher's shop. The shop was soon confiscated, however, and Rosenberg's parents were forced to work as itinerants during the rest of his life. Rosenberg himself was only able to attend school briefly; at age fourteen, he began to work as an engraver's apprentice, spending his spare time practicing painting. He eventually showed so much promise in the visual arts that he was granted funds to attend the Slade Art School, a significant center of aesthetic theory. The school—which trained artists of various stripes, including Rosenberg's friend Mark Gertler—prized originality above all, and rewarded students with vision above those with labored skill.

Rosenberg ultimately developed "infinity of suggestion," particularly in his poetry. But his early works seem too deeply influenced by the romantics to reveal much of Rosenberg's own voice. In Night and Day (1912), for example, Rosenberg's poems tend to ring with "poetical" sounding words, lending the verse a self-conscious, antique air. As Thomas Staley remarked in Dictionary of Literary Biography: "The poems in this thin volume are much like his early paintings in that they lacked originality, a distinctive voice. The influence of Shelley and Keats, especially Keats's 'Endymion,' is clear, and even the imagery is suffused with Keatsian diction. But the subject matter seems to probe beyond this influence to go backward in search of a more comprehensive vision of the world." Rosenberg produced one more volume of poetry, Youth (1915), before enlisting in a battalion to fight in World War I. Francine Ringold, writing for the Encyclopedia of World Literature, noted that Youth follows the general pattern of Night and Day: "all of these self-published works [Rosenberg's first volumes of poetry] demonstrate the moral earnestness and predilection for sonorous language that give R[osenberg]'s work its richness yet, when in excess, detract from its effectiveness." Irving Howe comments, similarly: "The early Rosenberg is always driving himself to say more than he has to say, because he thinks poets must speak to large matters. Later he learns that in a poppy in the trenches or a louse in a soldier's shirt, there is enough matter for poetry."

Rosenberg fought in World War I between 1915 and 1918, dying in the battle of Arras on April 1. During this period, his work reached a kind of early maturity; in this period he found a truly distinctive voice, one particularly indebted to the Old Testament and his sidelined Jewish identity. Many critics see Rosenberg strictly through his war poems. Others, however, insist that the war was only a subject for Rosenberg, or perhaps a challenge for which he was eminently suited. In many ways, Rosenberg's vision of the human relationship with God depends on his Jewish heritage—it depends on the metaphors of the Old Testament, at least. Rosenberg's Judaism is perhaps most apparent in his dramatic fragments, Moses and The Unicorn. "Had Rosenberg lived to develop further along the lines on which he had already moved," wrote David Daiches in Commentary, "he might have changed the course of modern English poetry, producing side by side with the poetry of Eliot and his school a richer and more monumental kind of verse, opposing a new romantic poetry to the new metaphysical brand."

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This poet was made known to me several years ago. A friend sent me a book of his poems. What many poets fail to recognize is that there are many hundeds of lesser known poets that composed truly fantastic poetry! And I have found in my 40+ years of studying famous -and- lesser known poets-  well over thirty that rival that of the great master poets of old(recognized Golden poets of old).

Consider this excerpt from the listed poem above....

verses quoted that Rosenberg gave birth to...

""Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand""

Such depths of thought and imagination in that. And expression of the frailty of mankind, the weakness of the flesh and the brevity of life!--RJL