Commentary on Break of Day in the Trenches by Isaac Rosenberg

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Break of Day in the Trenches by Isaac Rosenberg

        Isaac Rosenberg’s poem describes a day in wartime France. He wrote it in a trench, and posted it inside a letter to Eddie Marsh. His description hasn’t anything glorious or heroic. There’s no sentimentality or lust for glorious deaths, but only resignation and hope. He describes things simply as they are, reflecting his real-life experience through them.

        This poem is in free verse; there isn’t any regular metre or constant rhymes. This lack of metre and rhyme actually shows this real impression we have of the poet writing what he feels and without any restriction. In fact, there is a feeling in the first four lines of drowsy slow motion; he says “the darkness crumbles away” instead of saying the sun is rising. Moreover, this effect is increased by the long vowels of the second line. So while the poem begins, the night ends. We feel like nothing moves, except for a rat, which at first surprises the soldier –when it “leaps in [his] hand”– but then makes him amused by its mocking and strange look (“queer sardonic rat”). The tone is for now calm and quiet, while he’s resigned to his and his colleagues’ potential deaths. The next two lines are constructed in a paradox: the soldier “pulls the parapet’s poppy” and then “sticks [it] behind [his] ear.” Indeed, the first action reflects what a soldier does daily during war –he takes lives away–, and the second one is a romantic, lover action –a completely unsoldierly gesture. Additionally, the ‘p’ alliteration of line 5 reminds the sounds of gunfire, and the poppy image is a strong symbol of war by its red colour representing blood.

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        The voice becomes thereafter directed towards the rat. Indeed, when the soldier tells him that “they would shoot [him] if they knew/ [His] cosmopolitan sympathies”, he means that if the soldier gave himself as much freedom as the rat has (especially fraternising with the enemy), he would be shot. In his poem, Rosenberg also mentions the German troops, but with a sense of equality; he says to the rat “Now you have touched this English hand/ You will do the same to a German”, showing they’re all the same to the rat, i.e. two groups of men positioned on ...

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