never again

For Remembrance Day, my favourite poem by Isaac Rosenberg. There is something real and humbling about this poem - humbling I mean in its reality - that is also tremendously exhilarating. This is what art is for.

I have a little thing about Rosenberg, anyway. He reminds me of Keats (without the Odes): a very real person, a person born into poverty and difficulty who managed - one way and another and through the kindness of strangers - to the beginnings, and more than the beginnings, of both a painting and a writing career.

Rosenberg was an East End Jew from a cultivated family. His father had left Lithuania for Moscow, and had left Moscow - ironically, as it pans out - because of the danger of being called up for National Service. So he settled eventually (via Bristol) in London, where the family grew up seven-to-a-room in Cable Street, Stepney. Cable Street is famous now for the historic 'Battle of Cable Street' of 1936, in which the people of the East End routed the Fascists. Of course, Oswald Mosley and his crew had chosen that street for their march precisely because it was a Jewish neighbourhood - just as it is a Muslim neighbourhood nowadays. So, it's not much of a coincidence after all - just yet another reminder of the importance of remembering.

Rosenberg was a pacifist. He joined the Army because he found that the Army would send half your pay direct to your family. They needed the money.

His letters are incredibly affecting. He struggled, as you can imagine, to maintain a semblance of self at the front - corresponding on poetic matters, sending poems to magazines, maintaining, in fact, his writing career. He grew depressed, miserable, increasingly hopeless, but was determined not to let the war get in the way of his poetry. Then he was dead, at 27. The painting above is a self-portrait, and I find it vastly preferable to the equally-common photograph of him in uniform, which is merely an upsetting redord of how distressing the whole experience was. For everyone who endured it. Much better to remember vibrant, individual people than just 'soldiers'.

Craig Raine talks, in today's Telegraph, about why he doesn't like the War Poets; the main thing he charges them with, I think, is a striving for effect that renders them pallid and boring. (Ms B wonders: is this a pallid and boring statement to make on Remembrance Day?) He quotes passages from Orwell and even from Sassoon's prose which he says are far more vivid than any of their adjective-laden verse descriptions of the trenches, though Orwell's chirpy banter seems no more effective to me than Dulce et Decorum Est. Raine says that Owen's poems were written by "Outraged of Tunbridge Wells".

This poem by Rosenberg puts the rest of them out.


Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps in 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,
Bent 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.