POETS AND POETRY.

MR. ROSENBERG.*

Ma. Isaac ROSENBERG'S story is that of one of the many young men of promise who were killed in the War. All such histories are tragic, but that of Mr. Rosenberg has a particular individual poignancy. He was a Jew from Whitechapel, and the whole of his life was one long frustration of the aesthetic impulse. He was an able draughtsman, and sympathetic co-religionists gave him the means to learn at the Slade, but, though he enjoyed this work and followed it because he thought he saw there a means of earning a livelihood, poetry was his true vocation, and therefore even in -what should have been a joyful release into a world of art he was still pulled by the desire for a different sort of expression. Just when, with the help of Mr. Gordon Bottomley and Mr. Edward Marsh, he was freeing himself, and beginning to realize that this pull in his nature towards poetic expression represented a genuine vocation, his health gave way, and no sooner was his body more or less patched up and ready for work again than the War came and he was once more frustrated.

In reading of Rosenberg's struggles a picture rises before the mind like Piranesi's " Prison "—the little, lonely figure toiling in anguish of spirit up and up, always frustrated, always meeting fresh obstacles—wounded, buffeted, bleeding, and at last with one inexorable sweep of Fate's hand hurled down into the darkness of the grave. He was killed in action in March. 1918, having done work full of imperfection, but with the unmistakable stamp of genius on it, and having left to his friends the memory of a strong and subtle personality which could have made powerful use of a growing mastery of technique and of the mediumistic qualities of inspiration. In reading Isaac Rosenberg's poems we shall feel, if we care

44, Poems by Isaac Rosenberg. Selected and edited by Gordon Bottomley. P : Heinematua. 168.1

for poetry at all, a sense that the little book must not fall into unfriendly hands. As he writes himself from hospital somewhat pathetically :-

"Have you ever asked yourself why I always am rude to your criticisms ? Now, I intended to show you —'s letters and why I value his criticisms. I think anybody can pick holes and find unsound parts in any work of art ; anyone can say Christ's creed is a slave's creed, the Mosaic is a vindictive, savage creed, and so on. It is the unique and superior, the illuminating qualities one wants to find—discover the direction of the impulse. 'Whatever anybody thinks of a poet ho will always know himself : he knows that the most marvellously expressed idea is still nothing ; and it is stupid to think that praise can do him harm. I know sometimes one cannot exactly define one's feelings nor explain reasons for liking and disliking ; but there is then the right of a suspicion that the thing has not been properly understood or one is prejudiced. It is much my fault if I am not understood, I know ; but I also feel a kind of injustice if my idea is not grasped and Is ignored, and only petty cavilling at form, which I had known all along was so, is continually knocked into me. I feel quite sure that form is only a question of time. I am afraid I am more rude than ever."

All this was particularly true in his case, and therefore it was singularly wise and discreet of his friends, Mr.. Gordon Bottomley and Mr. Binyon, to preface his poems by his letters; for Rosenberg had the faculty of writing a letter that was like good talk. The inexperienced nearly always talk better to a friendly intimate than they write : here are no technical stones to stumble over, no straining to hold an unwilling reader's attention ; and here and there amid the most pleasant and natural chatter Rosenberg reveals himself with a charm denied to most of us :— " Your letter came to-day with Mr. Trevelyan's, like two friends to take me for a picnic." . . . " To most people life is a musical instrument which they are unable to play ; but in the musician's hands it becomes a living thing." . . . "The artist can see beauty everywhere." . . . "Have you ever picked up a book that looks like a Bible on the outside, and is full of poetry, or combo within ? My Hood is like that, and, I am afraid, so am L" . . . " When my things fail to be clear, I am sure it is because of the luckless choice of a word or the failure ta introduce a word that would flash my idea plain, as it is to my own mind."

But the reader must not go away with the impression that Rosenberg's poems are not good judged as detached phenomena. Several of them are very good indeed, but with any reasonable human luck Rosenberg might have become a great deal more than that. The best of the poems, " Dead Man's Dump," is too long to quote here. Though superficially concerned with horrors of war—guns being dragged over corpses and the bones crunching ; a wounded man's brain spattered on to a stretcher- bearer's face—yet the inner tone and conception of it is very different from, say, that of Mr. Robert Nichol's war poems. It possesses a sort of classicism which the reader feels is due to its not having been written off like an efficient correspondent's report, but slowly evolved in the mind like a living thing.

A short poem, " The Jew," will give the reader an idea of Rosenberg's emotional quality:—

"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 ? "

" The Unicorn " and " Moses " are two remarkable narrative fragments which were apparently to have been made into poetic plays. They seem to show that Rosenberg would have used narrative poetry to very good effect.

He wrote what proved to be his own epitaph. (It must be

explained that Youth was an early volume of poems which ha

had published.) " KILLED IN ACTION.

Your ' Youth ' has fallen from its shelf, And you have fallen, you yourself. They knocked a soldier on the head, I mourn the poet who fell dead. And yet I think it was by chance, By oversight you died in France. You were so poor an outward man, So small against your spirit's span, That Nature, being tired awhile, Saw but your outward human pile ; And Nature, who would never let A sun with light still in it set, Before you even reached your sky, In inadvertence let you die."

A. WILLIAMS-Emas.