Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg
Page 3
‘I am my own desire
I am what I would be.
If ye were your desire
Would ye lie under me,
And see me as you see?’
‘I am my own desire
While I lie under you,
145 And that which I would be
Desire will sing to you.’
DESIRE SINGS OF IMMORTALITY.
‘Mortals — ancient syllables
Spoken of God’s mouth,
Do spirits them chronicle
So they be not lost?
‘Music, breathed ephemeral —
Fragrant maid and child;
Bellow, croak and droning —
Age and cumbrous man.
‘Music that the croaking hears:
Croak, to mate the music:
Do Angels stand and throw their nets
For you, from banks Eterne?
‘Surely the speech of God’s mouth
Shall not be for naught!
Music wrought of God’s passion
Less than vanished dew?
‘As the sea through cloud to sea,
Thought through deed to thought,
Each returneth as they were,
So man to God’s mouth?’
NOON IN THE CITY
Noon blazes in the city, tumult whirled.
Flame crowned and garmented
With robes that flaunt
The splash of gold he throws
About my feet,
He weaves above my head
A golden chaunt,
A song that throbs and glows
Through all the noon-day heat.
No Pan-pipe melodies
Of wind and boughs.
No tired waves listless wash,
No silence deep
With spirit harmonies
Night only knows;
No tender breaking flush,
Dawn’s voice of dreams-asleep.
But buildings glorified,
Whose windows shine
And show the heaven, while far
Down the throng’d street
Mingles man’s song of pride
With the divine
Song of the day’s great star
Struck from the noon-day heat.
NONE HAVE SEEN THE LORD OF THE HOUSE
Stealth-hushed, the coiled night nesteth
In woods where light has strayed;
She is the shadow of the soul —
A virgin and afraid,
5 That in the absent Sultan’s chamber resteth,
Sleepless for fear he call.
Lord of this moon-dim mansion,
None know thy naked light.
O! were the day, of Thee dim shade,
10 As of the soul is night,
O! who would fear when in the bourne’s expansion,
With Thy first kiss we fade.
But the sad night shivers,
And palely wastes and dies;
15 A wraith under day’s burning hair,
And his humid golden eyes.
He has browsed by immortal meadowed rivers;
O! were she nesting there!
A GIRL’S THOUGHTS
Dim apprehension of a trust
Comes over me this quiet hour,
As though the silence were a flower,
And this, its perfume, dark like dust.
My individual self would cling
Through fear, through pride, unto its fears.
It strives to shut out what it hears,
The founts of being, murmuring.
O! need, whose hauntings terrorize;
Whether my maiden ways would hide,
Or lose, and to that need subside,
Life shrinks, and instinct dreads surprise.
WEDDED.
The knotted moment that untwists
Into the narrow laws of love,
Its ends are rolled round our four wrists
That once could stretch and rove.
See our confined fingers stray
O’er delicate fibres that recoil,
And blushing hints as cold as clay;
Love is tired after toil.
But hush! two twin moods meet in air;
Two spirits of one gendered thought.
Our chained hands loosened everywhere
Kindness like death’s have caught.
MIDSUMMER FROST
A July ghost, aghast at the strange winter,
Wonders, at burning noon, (all summer seeming),
How, like a sad thought buried in light words,
Winter, an alien presence, is ambushed here.
5 See, from the fire-fountained noon there creep
Lazy yellow ardours towards pale evening,
To thread dark and vain fire
Over my unsens’d heart,
Dead heart, no urgent summer can reach,
10 Hidden as a root from air or a star from day;
A frozen pool whereon mirth dances;
Where the shining boys would fish.
My blinded brain pierced is,
And searched by a thought, and pangful
15 With bitter ooze of a joyous knowledge
Of some starred time outworn.
Like blind eyes that have slinked past God,
And light, their untasked inheritance,
(Sealed eyes that trouble never the Sun)
20 Yet has feel of a Maytime pierced.
He heareth the Maytime dances;
Frees from their airy prison, bright voices,
To loosen them in his dark imagination,
Powered with girl revels rare
25 And silks and merry colours,
And all the unpeopled ghosts that walk in words.
Till wave white hands that ripple lakes of sadness,
Until the sadness vanishes and the stagnant pool remains.
Underneath this summer air can July dream
30 How, in night-hanging forest of eating maladies,
A frozen forest of moon unquiet madness,
The moon-drunk haunted pierced soul dies;
Starved by its Babel folly, lying stark,
Unvexed by July’s warm eyes.
PART II. THE CYNIC’S LAMP.
LOVE AND LUST
No dream of mortal joy;
Yet all the dreamers die.
We wither with our world
To make room for her sky.
O lust! when you lie ravished,
Broken in the dust,
We will call for love in vain,
Finding love was lust.
IN PICCADILLY
Lamp-lit faces! to you
What is your starry dew?
Gold flowers of the night blue!
Deep in wet pavement’s slime,
Mud rooted, is your fierce prime,
To bloom in lust’s coloured clime.
The sheen of eyes that lust,
Dew, time made your trust,
Lights your passionless dust.
A MOOD
You are so light and gay,
So slight, sweet maid;
Your limbs like leaves in play,
Or beams that grasses braid;
5 O! joys whose jewels pray
My breast to be inlaid.
Frail fairy of the streets;
Strong, dainty lure;
For all men’s eyes the sweets
10 Whose lack makes hearts so poor;
While your heart loveless beats,
Light, laughing, and impure.
O! fragrant waft of flesh
Float through me so —
15 My limbs are in your mesh,
My blood forgets to flow.
Ah! lilied meadows fresh,
It knows where it would go.
PART III. CHANGE AND SUNFIRE.
APRIL DAWN
Pale light hid in light
Stirs the still day-spring;
Wavers the dull sight
With a sp
irit’s wing.
Dreams, in frail rose mist,
Lurking to waylay,
Subtle-wise have kist
Winter into May.
Nothing to the sight...
Pool of pulseless air.
Spirits are in flight,
And my soul their lair.
IF YOU ARE FIRE
If you are fire and I am fire,
Who blows the flame apart
So that desire eludes desire
Around one central heart?
A single root and separate bough,
And what blind hands between
That make our longing’s mutual glow
As if it had not been?
DIM-WATERY-LIGHTS, GLEAMING ON GIBBERING FACES
Dim-watery-lights, gleaming on gibbering faces,
Faces speechful, barren of soul and sordid.
Huddled and chewing a jest, lewd and gabbled insidious,
Laughter, born of its dung, flashes and floods like sunlight,
Filling the room with a sense of a soul lethargic and kindly.
Touches my soul with a pathos, a hint of a wide desolation.
BREAK IN BY SUBTLER WAYS
Break in by subtier nearer ways;
Dulled closeness is too far.
And separate we are
Through joined days.
The shine and strange romance of time
In absence hides and change.
Shut eyes and hear the strange
Perfect new chime.
LADY, YOU ARE MY GOD
Lady, you are my God —
Lady, you are my heaven.
If I am your God
Labour from your heaven.
Lady, you are my God,
And shall not love win heaven?
If Love made me God
Deeds must win my heaven.
If my love made you God,
What more can I for heaven?
THE ONE LOST
I mingle with your bones.
You steal in subtle noose
This lighted dust Jehovah loans
And now I lose.
5 What will the Lender say
When I shall not be found,
Safe sheltered at the Judgment Day,
Being in you bound?
He’ll hunt thronged wards of Heaven,
10 Call to uncoffined earth
‘Where is this soul unjudged, not given
Dole for good’s dearth?’
And I, lying so safe
Within you, hearing all,
15 To have cheated God shall laugh,
Freed by your thrall.
MY SOUL IS ROBBED
My soul is robbed by your most treacherous eyes
Treading its intricate infinities.
Stay there, rich robbers! what I lose is dross;
Since my life is your dungeon, where is loss?
5 Ah! as the sun is prisoned in the heaven,
Whose walls dissolve, of their own nature bereaven,
So do your looks, as idly, without strife,
Cover all steeps of sense, which no more pasture life.
Which no more feel, but only know you there,
10 In this blind trance of some white anywhere.
Come — come — that glance engendered ecstasy —
That subtle unspaced mutual intimacy
Whereby two spirits of one thought commune
Like separate instruments that play one tune,
15 And the whole miracle and amazement of
The unexpected flowering of love
Concentres to an instant that expands
And takes unto itself the strangest of strange lands.
GOD MADE BLIND
It were a proud God-guiling, to allure
And flatter, by some cheat of ill, our Fate
To hold back the perfect crookedness, its hate
Devised, and keep it poor,
5 And ignorant of our joy —
Masked in a giant wrong of cruel annoy,
That stands as some bleak hut to frost and night,
While hidden in bed is warmth and mad delight.
For all Love’s heady valour and loved pain
10 Towers in our sinews that may not suppress
(Shut to God’s eye) Love’s springing eagerness,
And mind to advance his gain
Of gleeful secrecy
Through dolorous clay, which his eternity
15 Has pierced, in light that pushes out to meet
Eternity without us, heaven’s heat.
And then, when Love’s power hath increased so
That we must burst or grow to give it room,
And we can no more cheat our God with gloom,
20 We’ll cheat Him with our joy.
For say! what can God do
To us, to Love, whom we have grown into?
Love! the poured rays of God’s Eternity!
We are grown God — and shall His self-hate be?
THE DEAD HEROES
Flame out, you glorious skies,
Welcome our brave,
Kiss their exultant eyes;
Give what they gave.
5 Flash, mailed seraphim,
Your burning spears;
New days to outflame their dim
Heroic years.
Thrills their baptismal tread
10 The bright proud air;
The embattled plumes outspread
Burn upwards there.
Flame out, flame out, O Song!
Star ring to star,
15 Strong as our hurt is strong
Our children are.
Their blood is England’s heart;
By their dead hands
It is their noble part
20 That England stands.
England — Time gave them thee;
They gave back this
To win Eternity
And claim God’s kiss.
THE CLOISTER
Our eyes no longer sail the tidal streets,
Nor harbour where the hours like petals float
By sensual treasures glittering through thin walls
Of women’s eyes and colour’s mystery.
The roots of our eternal souls were fed
On the world’s dung and now their blossoms gleam.
God gives to glisten in an angel’s hair
These He has gardened, for they please His eyes.
EXPRESSION
Call — call — and bruise the air:
Shatter dumb space!
Yea! We will fling this passion everywhere;
Leaving no place
5 For the superb and grave
Magnificent throng,
The pregnant queens of quietness that brave
And edge our song
Of wonder at the light,
10 (Our life-leased home),
Of greeting to our housemates. And in might
Our song shall roam
Life’s heart, a blossoming fire
Blown bright by thought,
15 While gleams and fades the infinite desire,
Phantasmed naught.
Can this be caught and caged?
Wings can be dipt
Of eagles, the sun’s gaudy measure gauged,
20 But no sense dipt
In the mystery of sense:
The troubled throng
Of words break out like smother’d fire through dense
And smouldering wrong.
MOSES
Following the publication of Youth, Rosenberg set about looking for work, but he could find nothing and struggled to make ends meet. Throughout the early autumn of 1915, he considered volunteering for the Royal Army Medical Corps, due to his pacific inclinations, but, being only just over five feet in height, he was too short to be accepted. With no money and no positive prospects, he had little choice than to enlist in October with the Infantry, allowing his mother to claim the Separation Allowance that was given to d
ependants. Rosenberg was then sent to the Bantam Battalion (a special unit for soldiers below the usual minimum height) of the 12th Suffolk Regiment stationed at Bury St. Edmunds. Although some recruits were later removed from the Battalion, being discovered to be of no military use, Rosenberg remained.
During his early days of difficult training, Rosenberg worked on a play titled Moses, which he had begun writing in South Africa. In May 1916, just before being posted overseas, Moses was published, with ten poems also included in the small book. The poet had little time to see how his third collection fared, as he set sail for France with his Battalion.
CONTENTS
SPRING 1916
GOD
I DID NOT PLUCK AT ALL; OR, FIRST FRUIT
CHAGRIN
IN THE PARK
DESIRE SINGS OF IMMORTALITY
WEDDED
MARCHING
SLEEP
HEART’S FIRST WORD
SPRING 1916
Slow, rigid, is this masquerade
That passes as through a difficult air;
Heavily — heavily passes.
What has she fed on? Who her table laid
5 Through the three seasons? What forbidden fare
Ruined her as a mortal lass is?
I played with her two years ago,
Who might be now her own sister in stone,
So altered from her May mien,
10 When round vague pink a necklace of warm snow
Laughed to her throat where my mouth’s touch had gone.
How is this, ruined Queen?
Who lured her vivid beauty so
To be that strained chilled thing that moves
15 So ghastly midst her young brood
Of pregnant shoots that she for men did grow?
Where are the strong men who made these their loves?
Spring! God pity your mood.
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
5 To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,