Isaac Rosenberg
The Immortals
I killed them, but they would not die. Yea! all the day and all the night For them I could not rest or sleep, Nor guard from them nor hide in flight. Then in
Through These Pale Cold Days
Through these pale cold days What dark faces burn Out of three thousand years, And their wild eyes yearn, While underneath their brows Like waifs their spirits grope For the pools of Hebron again
In the Trenches
I snatched two poppies From the parapet’s ledge, Two bright red poppies That winked on the ledge. Behind my ear I stuck one through, One blood red poppy I gave to you. The sandbags
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 To
Returning, We Hear the Larks
Sombre the night is. And though we have our lives, we know What sinister threat lies there. Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know This poison-blasted track opens on our camp – On a
Louse Hunting
Nudes stark and glistening, Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces And raging limbs Whirl over the floor one fire. For a shirt verminously busy Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths Godhead might
On Receiving News of the War
Snow is a strange white word. No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter’s cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know.
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
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
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 To stay the flood of brutish men Upon