Dragging the sun across the shell of thought.
A web threaded with fading fire.
Futile and fragile lure!
10 All July walks her floors that roof this 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.
15 Amorous to woo the golden kissing sun,
Your flaunting green hoods bachic eyes
And flower-flinging hands,
Show quaint as in some frolic masker’s whim,
Or painted ruby on a dead white rose.
20 Deriding those blind who slinked past God
And their untasked inheritance,
(Whose sealed eyes trouble not the sun)
With a thought of Maytime once,
And Maytime dances;
25 Of a dim pearl-faery boat
And golden glimmerings;
Waving white hands that ripple lakes of sadness
Until the sadness vanishes and the stagnant pool remains.
Pitiless I am, for I bind thee, laughter’s apostle,
30 Even as thy garland’s glance, and thy soul is merry, to see
How in night-hanging forest of eating maladies,
A frozen forest of moon-unquiet madness
The moon-drunk, haunted, pierced soul, dies.
Tarnished and arid, dead before it dies.
35 Starved by its Babel folly, stark it lies,
Stabbed by life’s jealous eyes.
1914
SLEEP II.
A spray of shivering quiet
Filters under my lid.
Thinnest veils are shaken, are dropt —
Silver is tarnished from whispers hid.
5 Outside the world, their twilight stone,
Our unfamiliar ghosts are known...
Though the cunning Gods outwit us, nay,
We have dear gyves and torpor as they.
The Gods with their oblique eyes,
10 The subtle Gods lying hid,
Elbowed in dawn their twilight wrists
Shake where sudden a mortal slid
Into their own unvexed peace,
And the moving stillness breaks over their knees
15 Far from our bodies flat and straight,
That bear like a stone the whole night’s weight.
Upon my lips, like a cloud
To burst on the peaks of light,
Sit cowled lost impossible things
20 To tie my hands at the noon’s height.
And breath floats like a twilight old
Of some spent words pale shredded gold;
And soft hair laid on a feathered fur
Sinks dim as a thought of a sound astir.
GREEN THOUGHTS ARE
Green thoughts are
Ice block on a barrow
Gleaming in July.
A little boy with bare feet
And jewels at his nose stands by.
LUSITANIA
Chaos! that coincides with this militant purpose.
Chaos! the heart of this earnest malignancy.
Chaos! that helps, chaos that gives to shatter
Mind-wrought, mind-unimagining energies
For topless ill, of dynamite and iron.
Soulless logic, inventive enginery.
Now you have got the peace-faring Lusitania,
Germany’s gift — all earth they would give thee,
Chaos.
THE TROOP SHIP
Grotesque and queerly huddled
Contortionists to twist
The sleepy soul to a sleep,
We lie all sorts of ways
And cannot sleep.
The wet wind is so cold,
And the lurching men so careless,
That, should you drop to a doze,
Winds’ fumble or men’s feet
Are on your face.
1916
AUGUST 1914
What in our lives is burnt
In the fire of this?
The heart’s dear granary?
The much we shall miss?
Three lives hath one life —
Iron, honey, gold.
The gold, the honey gone —
Left is the hard and cold.
Iron are our lives
Molten right through our youth.
A burnt space through ripe fields,
A fair mouth’s broken tooth.
1916
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?
FROM FRANCE
The spirit drank the cafe lights;
All the hot life that glittered there,
And heard men say to women gay,
‘Life is just so in France’.
The spirit dreams of cafe lights,
And golden faces and soft tones,
And hears men groan to broken men,
‘This is not Life in France’.
Heaped stones and a charred signboard shows
With grass between and dead folk under,
And some birds sing, while the spirit takes wing.
And this is Life in France.
1916
IN THE TRENCHES
I snatched two poppies
From the parapet’s ledge,
Two bright red poppies
That winked on the ledge.
5 Behind my ear
I stuck one through,
One blood red poppy
I gave to you.
The sandbags narrowed
10 And screwed out our jest,
And tore the poppy
You had on your breast...
Down — a shell — O! Christ,
I am choked... safe... dust blind, I
15 See trench floor poppies
Strewn. Smashed you lie.
1916
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 queer sardonic rat,
5 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
10 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,
15 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
20 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;
25 But mine in my ear is safe —
Just a little white with the dust.
1916
HOME-THOUGHTS FROM FRANCE
Wan, fragile faces of joy!
Pitiful mouths that strive
To light with smiles the place
We dream we walk alive.
To you I stretch my hands,
Hands shut in pitiless trance
In the land of ruin and woe,
The desolate land of France.
Dear faces startled and shaken,
Out of wild dust and sounds
You yearn to me
, lure and sadden
My heart with futile bounds.
A WORM FED ON THE HEART OF CORINTH
A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,
Babylon and Rome:
Not Paris raped tall Helen,
But this incestuous worm,
Who lured her vivid beauty
To his amorphous sleep.
England! famous as Helen
Is thy betrothal sung
To him the shadowless,
More amorous than Solomon.
1916
THE DYING SOLDIER
‘Here are houses’, he moaned,
‘I could reach but my brain swims.’
Then they thundered and flashed
And shook the earth to its rims.
‘They are gunpits’, he gasped,
‘Our men are at the guns.
Water — water — O water
For one of England’s dying sons.’
‘We cannot give you water,
Were all England in your breath,’
‘Water! — water! — O water!’
He moaned and swooned to death.
IN WAR
Fret the nonchalant noon
With your spleen
Or your gay brow,
For the motion of your spirit
5 Ever moves with these.
When day shall be too quiet,
Deaf to you
And your dumb smile,
Untuned air shall lap the stillness
10 In the old space for your voice —
The voice that once could mirror
Remote depths
Of moving being,
Stirred by responsive voices near,
15 Suddenly stilled for ever.
No ghost darkens the places
Dark to One;
But my eyes dream,
And my heart is heavy to think
20 How it was heavy once.
In the old days when death
Stalked the world
For the flower of men,
And the rose of beauty faded
25 And pined in the great gloom,
One day we dug a grave:
We were vexed
With the sun’s heat.
We scanned the hooded dead:
30 At noon we sat and talked.
How death had kissed their eyes
Three dread noons since,
How human art won
The dark soul to flicker
35 Till it was lost again:
And we whom chance kept whole —
But haggard,
Spent — were charged
To make a place for them who knew
40 No pain in any place.
The good priest came to pray;
Our ears half heard,
And half we thought
Of alien things, irrelevant;
45 And the heat and thirst were great.
The good priest read: ‘I heard..
Dimly my brain
Held words and lost...
Sudden my blood ran cold...
50 God! God! it could not be.
He read my brother’s name;
I sank —
I clutched the priest.
They did not tell me it was he
55 Was killed three days ago.
What are the great sceptred dooms
To us, caught
In the wild wave?
We break ourselves on them,
60 My brother, our hearts and years.
1917
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.
5 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;
10 I killed till all my strength was gone.
And still they rose to torture me,
For Devils only die in fun.
I used to think the Devil hid
In women’s smiles and wine’s carouse.
15 I called him Satan, Balzebub.
But now I call him, dirty louse.
1917
LOUSE HUNTING
Nudes — stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
5 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.
10 Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons’ pantomime
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
15 See the gibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
20 See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
25 Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.
1917
RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS
Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
5 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.
10 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,
15 Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
1917
DEAD MAN’S 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
5 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,
10 They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.
Earth has waited for them
15 All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended — stopped and held.
20 What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit
Earth! have they gone into you?
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their souls’ sack,
25 Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?
None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
30 When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.
What of us, who flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
35 Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.
The air is loud with death,
40 The dark air spurts with fire
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
These dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called ‘an end!’
45 But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.
A man’s brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer’s face;
50 His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.
They left this dead with the older dead,
55 Stretched at the cross roads.
Burnt black by strange decay,
Their sinister faces lie
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
60 More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.
Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
65 To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break,
Or the wheels to break,
70 Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.
Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
75 With his tortured upturned sight,
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.
1917
DAUGHTERS OF WAR
Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs —
Their naked dances with man’s spirit naked
By the root side of the tree of life,
(The underside of things
5 And shut from earth’s profoundest eyes).
I saw in prophetic gleams
Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg Page 10
