A self-portrait of Isaac Rosenberg, who painted as well as writing poetry
An evening celebrating the life and work of Isaac Rosenberg is taking place on Sunday, 27th November between 6pm and 8pm in Senate House, Bloomsbury.
Featuring actress Miriam Margolyes, Alexander Knox, Simon Haynes, Philip Bell, Elaine Feinstein and Vivi Lachs and her band, this evening of words, music and images has been written and devised by Rosenberg’s biographer, Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
The event is being hosted by the Jewish East End Celebration Society to raise funds for a statue of Rosenberg in Torrington Square, outside Birkbeck’s main Malet Street building.
The First World War inspired a huge amount of poetry, by both soldiers and civilians. One of the most well-known poets, Isaac Rosenberg, studied in the evenings at the Art School at Birkbeck from 1907-1908, while spending his day as an apprentice graver. Rosenberg won several prizes during his time at the College and exhibited his work in the Art School’s annual exhibition after leaving. Rosenberg was killed while fighting in the Battle of the Somme in the spring of 1918. Today, we publish one of his most famous poems to mark Armistice Day.
In 2000, Professor Steven Connor gave a lecture at Birkbeck about Rosenberg’s life and works. Read the lecture.
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,
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,
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
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.
