But you have brought me hither.
But you are barren, and man will not willingly suffer obliteration.
This woman is for me —
What Titans will those heaving breasts suckle...
THE UNICORN
SAUL. LILITH. TEL. ENOCH.
Umusol... The Unicorn
SCENE. A track through a woody place. Against the hedge is a half sunk wagon in a quagmire. The mules stand shivering. SAUL sits with his head between his knees. Thunder and lightning.
SAUL. Ah! miserable! miserable!
Is it gone... oooooh! that wild might of wind
Still howling in my ears... the glittering beast.
If I look up and see it over me
I will shrink up... I cower, I quail,
I am a shivering grass in a chill wind.
This is no mortal terror... spectres wail,
Stricken trunks’ and beasts’ spirits wail across to mine
And whirl me, strew me, pass and repass me.
Let me look up; break this unnatural fear.
Ah God! Ah God! what black thing towers towards me
Wailing...
[A young man on horseback sweeps past crying in a despairing voice ‘Dora, Dora’]
SAUL. IS there no end? Murderers are suffered to die.
What have I done; these ghosts that seek their loves
The fearful unicorn has devoured, pass me
As if I was the road to it.
It has breathed on me, and I must reek of it.
Twice have I seen this flaring thing,
My life stormed in the wind of this.
And always wailing, wails and floats away,
The shrieks of women and the wail of men.
How chilled my spirit is, how clutched with terror,
Lilith, my Lilith
Like my hands in the membranes of my brain
To pluck your blond hair out.
I’ll run to you... I totter... A wavering wall
Against me is the air; what pulls me back?
God! in that dizzying flash, I saw just now
Phantoms and nomads
And balls of fire pursuing
A panting streaming maenad.
What ghosts be these so white and mute.
Stay... Stay... Ah miserable...
That crash... thunder... no...
O God it falls on me.
My brain gives way; look, look...
[The Unicorn flashes by, lit by lightning and a voice calls ‘Umusol’.
SAUL sinks moaning and shivering against a tree]
Ooowe... Oooowe... I sink.
A breath will lift me up and scatter me.
My name was wailed and all my tissues
Untwined and fell apart.
Sick... Sick... I will lie down and die. How can I die?
Kind lightning, sweetest lightning, cleave me through
Lift up these shreds of being and mix me with
This wind, this darkness.
I’ll strive once more. See how the wheels are sunk
Right to the axle... Ah impotent puny me...
Vain. Futile.
Hi hi hi hi, is there no man about.
Who would be wandering in a storm like this? —
Hark... was that a human voice?
Sh... when that crash ceases.
Like laughter... like laughter,
Sure that was laughter... just the laughter of ours.
Hi hi hi hi hi hi...
My voice fears me.
God cover my eyes.
The Unicorn rushes by and when he looks up again, his hair stands up. A naked black giant stands there and signs for SAUL’S hand. Mechanically as in a trance, SAUL gives his hand and together they heave and lift the wheels. The mules suddenly start; SAUL is lifted into the cart and the black drives. The exertion has revived SAUL who is thinking of the warm humanlike grasp of the hand in his.
SAUL. Why quails my heart? God riding with
A mortal would absorb him.
He touched my hand, here is my hand the same.
Sure I am whirled in some dark fantasy —
A dizzying cloven wink, the beast, the black,
And I ride now... ride, ride, the way I know
That rushing terror... I shudder yet.
The haughty contours of a swift white horse
And on its brows a tree, a branching tree,
And on its back a golden girl bound fast.
It glittered by
And all the phantoms wailing.
Then sudden, here I ride.
His monstrous posture, why his neck’s turn
Were our thews’ adventures; some Amazon’s son doubtless
From the dark countries. Can it be
The storm spirit, storm’s pilot
With all the heaving debris of Noah’s sunken days
Dragged on his loins.
What have I lived and agonised today, today.
It seems long centuries since I went to the town
For our week’s victuals, I saw the beast
And rode into the town a shaken ghost,
Not Saul at all, but something that was Saul,
And saw folk wailing; and men that could not weep.
And my heart utterance was Lilith,
Whose face seemed cast in faded centuries
While the blind beast was rushing back towards her,
Sweeping past me, leaving me so with the years.
Mere human travail never broke my spirit
Only my throat to impatient blasphemies.
But God’s unthinkable imagination
Invents new tortures for nature
Whose wisdom falters here.
No used experience can make aware
The imminent unknowable.
Sudden destruction
Till the stricken soul wails in anguish
Tom here and there.
Man could see and live never believed.
I ride... I ride... thunder crowned
In the shelter of a glis’ning chanting giant.
What flaring chant the storm’s undertones,
Full of wild yearning,
And makes me think of Lilith
And that swift beast, it went that way.
My house my blood all lean to its weird flight.
But Lilith will be sleeping... ah miss my Lilith.
Swifter my mules swifter
Destroy the space... transport me instantly
For my soul yearns and fears.
TEL. HOW his voice fears... If I strove utterance
What fear would be in mine.
I saw her... I fled... he brings me back.
Umusol... a golden mane shall mingle with your horns
Before the storm shall cease.
SAUL. Yonder, my house is yonder.
I feared to see it vanished
On the ground from Lilith.
TEL. The powered storm means such devastation.
(I dread to enter, yet my soul hungers so intense).
[SAUL springs from the cart and hurries into the room where LILITH sits, white and terror stricken, wringing her hands]
LILITH. Pity me. Where is Saul...
Do not touch me.
SAUL. Lilith dear, look up, it is me.
LILITH. Saul, oh Saul, do not go away.
Who is that?
[SAUL kisses her]
SAUL. HOW frightened you are.
See where I sunk in the mire, the mud...
His was the healing hand.
Lilith your viol
To force this gloom away even while I dry
In the inner chamber.
I am dank and tired.
LILITH. Saul do not leave me,
I dread to look up and see again
Two balls of fire casement glaring...
SAUL. This is some fantasy: play music till I come.
[TEL crouches in the shadow and she turns to take the viol down]
&nb
sp; LILITH. The roots of a torn universe are wrenched,
See the bent trees like masts of derelicts in ocean
That beats upon this house this ark.
TEL. Unearthly accents float amid the howling storm.
Her mouth moves... is it thence...
Secret Mother of my orphan spirit
Who art thou?
LILITH. I think he speaks, this howling storm sheets out all so.
I’ll play and ease my heavy heart.
TEL. Was that the lightning?
Those fragile gleaming wrists untangle me,
Those looks tread out my soul.
Somewhere I know those looks, I lost it somewhere.
[LILITH draws nearer and sings softly]
LILITH. Beauty is music’s secret soul,
Creeping about man’s senseis.
He cannot hold it, or know it ever,
But yearns and yearns to hold it once.
Ah! when he yearns not shall he not wither?
For music then will have no place
In the world’s ear, but mix in windless darkness.
TEL. Am I gone blind?
I swim in a white haze.
What shakes my life to golden tremors...?
I have no life at all... I am a crazed shadow
From a golden body
That melts my iron flesh, I flow from it.
I know the haze, the light,
I am a shuddering pulse
Hung over the abyss. I shall look up
Even if I fall, fall, fall, fall forever,
I faint, tremble.
LILITH. Still the rain beats and beats.
[TEL looks up furtively, then prostrates himself]
TEL. Ah woe, ah woe. [He sobs]
LILITH. Has lightning turned his brain?
Is this a maniac? Saul, Saul.
TEL. Hear me, hear me.
Do I speak, or think I speak,
I am so faint... Wait,
Let my dazed blood resolve itself to words.
Where have I strayed... incomprehensible...
Yet here... somewhere
An instant flashes a large face of dusk
Like heights of night ringing with unseen larks
Or blindness dim with dreams.
I hear a low voice... a crooning...
Some whisperings, and shadows vast,
A crying through the forest — wailing
behind impassable places
Whose air was never warmed by a woman’s lips
Bestial man-shapes ride dark impulses
Through roots in the bleak blood, then hide
In shuddering light from their self loathing.
They fade in arid light —
Beings unnatured by their craving for they know
Obliteration’s spectre. They are few.
They wail their souls for continuity
And bow their heads and knock their breasts before
The many mummies whose wail in dust is more
Than these who cry, their brothers who loiter yet.
Great beasts’ and small beasts’ eyes have place
As eyes of women to their hopeless eyes
That hunt in bleakness for the dread might,
The incarnate female soul of generation.
The daughters of any clime are not imagined
Even of their occult ears, senses profound,
For their corporeal ears and baby senses
Were borne from gentle voices and gentle forms
By men misused flying from misuse
Who gave them suck even from their narrow breasts
Only for this, that they should wither
That they should be as an uttered sound in the wind.
[He sees SAUL’S glittering eyes in the dark doorway. It rouses him]
By now my men have raided the city,
I heard a far shrieking.
LILITH. This is most piteous, most fearful,
I fear him, his hungry eyes
Burn into me, like those balls of fire.
TEL. There is a tower of skulls,
Where birds make nests
And staring beasts stand by with many flocks
And man looks on with hopeless eyes...
LILITH. O horrible, I hear Saul rattle those chains in the cellar.
TEL. What clanking chains?
When a man’s brains crack with longing
We chain him to some slender beast to breed.
LILITH. Tell me, tell me, who took my cousin Dora,
Oh God those balls of fire...
Are you men?... tell me.
TEL. Marvellous creature.
Night tender beast.
Has the storm passed into me,
What ecstasy, what lightning
Has touched the lightning in my blood.
Voluptuous
Crude vast terrible hunger overpowers...
A gap... a yawning...
My blood knocks... inarticulate to make you understand,
To shut you in itself
Uncontrollable. [He stretches his arms out]
Small dazzling face I shut you in my soul —
[She shrieks. SAUL appears, looking about dazed, holding an iron
chain; while the door is burst open and ENOCH bursts in. He springs on
TEL]
ENOCH. Where is my Dora, where?
Pity, rider of the Unicorn.
TEL. Yonder.
[Through the casement they see riding under the rainbow a black naked host on various animals, the Unicorn leading. A woman is clasped on every one, some are frantic, others white or unconscious, some nestle laughing. ENOCH with madness in his eyes leaps through the casement and disappears with a splash in the well. SAUL leaps after him shouting “The Unicorn’. TEL places the unconscious LILITH on the Unicorn and they all ride away]
ADAM
DRAMATIC FRAGMENT
Rosenberg abandoned this fragment once he began work in earnest on The Unicorn.
PERSONS:
SPIRIT OF DISSOLUTION. LILITH.
SPIRIT. Crazed shadow from your golden body
Lilith, Lilith, I am.
I am a tremor in space
Caught in your beauty’s grasp.
My tentacles that bore so secretly
Into the health of the world, go suddenly lax.
When my pulses pale to your beauty’s music
At night in your bed chamber
Cruel your glimmering mirror shakes,
As my thoughts, my pulses, pass
Hungry to you, to roam your vivid beauty.
Do you not hear their moan
Beside those four lips darkened in glee,
Shapeless in voluntary glee,
Two where mine should be
Of his your master Adam,
Whose common bread you are
Now he is hungry no more?
Lilith — be kind.
LILITH. If you are stronger than Adam.
SPIRIT. For your sake only, girl,
I have been cruel to my instinct
And the venom in my hand.
For your sake, and the mutable winds of love.
LILITH. I am beautiful.
SPIRIT. Ask Adam.
LILITH. He is a widower since I died to him.
SPIRIT. I am a ghost and you are, we will wed then.
LILITH. I was a lover without a lover.
SPIRIT. Let him be king without a kingdom,
Let me destroy a city, his people.
The Letters
Slade School of Fine Art at University College, London — during his time at Slade School, Rosenberg notably studied alongside David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Dora Carrington, William Roberts, and Christopher Nevinson.
INDEX OF LETTERS BY YEAR OF COMPOSITION
CONTENTS
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
; 1915
1916
1917
1918
1910
TO ISRAEL ZANGWILL
159 Oxford Street,
Mile End, E.
I hope I am not taking too great a presumption by intruding in this matter on your valuable time. If the poems do not merit any part of the time you may do me the honour to bestow on them, then the presumption is the more unpardonable; but though I myself am diffident about them, one has, I suppose, whether one has reason or not, a sort of half-faith; and it is this half-faith — misplaced or not — that has led me to this course. If you think them worth criticism, (which is more than I expect,) on that depends whether this half-faith is to be made an entire one or none at all. I don’t know whether it’s justifiable, and I do not mention it to abate one jot of your candour, but only in extenuation of my presumption, to remind you that this is not the first time I have wearied you with my specimens of desperate attempts to murder and mutilate King’s English beyond all shape of recognition; for about five years ago, when I had just been apprenticed to Carl Hentschel’s as a Photo Etcher, I had the hardihood to send you some verses which you were kind enough to think were ‘promising’, and told me I would hear from you again. Of course, it isn’t likely you will remember the occasion, amid your multifarious duties of your valuable life but to me it was an event; and I only mention it to show that I have some sort of right to bother you with these; it being in a way your own kind criticism of the poem five years ago that encouraged me to continue in these,
Yours humbly,
ISAAC ROSENBERG
TO MISS SEATON,
It is horrible to think that all these hours, when my days are full of vigour and my hands and soul craving for self-expression, I am bound, chained to this fiendish mangling-machine, without hope and almost desire of deliverance, and the days of youth go by... I have tried to make some sort of self-adjustment to circumstances by saying, ‘It is all experience’; but, good God! it is all experience, and nothing else... I really would like to take up painting seriously; I think I might do something at that; but poetry — I despair of ever writing excellent poetry. I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do. My mind is so cramped and dulled and fevered, there is no consistency of purpose, no oneness of aim; the very fibres are torn apart, and application deadened by the fiendish persistence of the coil of circumstance.
1911
TO MISS SEATON,
Congratulate me! I’ve cleared out of the — shop, I hope for good and all. I’m free — free to do anything, hang myself or anything except work... I’m very optimistic, now that I don’t know what to do, and everything seems topsy-turvy.
Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg Page 16