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Published: 25 September 2008

Rosenberg: lost in battle

Isaac Rosenberg - War poet rides the Underground

THE body of the poet Isaac Rosenberg was never found. He was 28 when he went out on dawn patrol from the muddy trenches of the Somme, near Arras, in 1918. He didn’t return.
Now, as the 90th anniversary of the Armistice on November 11 approaches, the dead poet is alive and making his mark again – riding on the London Tube, to be seen daily by some three million passengers in 3,000 carriages as from Monday this week.
Rosenberg’s prophetic 1914 poem, On Receiving News of the War, written before he enlisted while visiting relatives in South Africa, has been chosen by the Hampstead-based Poems on the Underground group as one of the latest batch it is promoting for eight weeks.
“It is a wonderful poem, so tragic yet inspiring, and we thought it was very appropriate for the Armistice anniversary,” Judith Chernaik told me at her home in Mansfield Road, Hampstead.
“Rosenberg’s voice is as relevant today as it was when he wrote his poetry amid the awful mud and blood of the trenches. ”
The poem is one of three devoted to the Armistice anniversary. One stanza from Rosenberg’s poem has been omitted from the Tube presentation because there is only room for only four stanzas for each poem.
The poem On Receiving News of the War appears as follows:

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.
No man knows why.In all men’s hearts it is.
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould…O! ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume.
Give back this
universe
Its pristine bloom.

Gerald Isaaman

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