These differences in character and background equally affected their posthumous reputations, quite apart from their relative merits as poets. Owen was accepted as a hero, with a collection of his poetry published soon after his death in 1918. Rosenberg’s body was never found, and he was not given a memorial headstone by the government until 1927, on which his parents had to pay to have ‘Artist and Poet’ engraved, and request a Star of David rather than a cross above his name. His poetry did not see the light of day until 1922 when a group of friends collected his papers together and published a collection at their own expense.
The underlying similarities between their bodies of work are twofold. Both were clearly men of compassion who felt excruciatingly unable to change the horror they encountered (“ What passing bells for those who die as cattle?” – Anthem For Doomed Youth, “I killed them, but they would not die. / Yea! all the day and all the night/ For them I could not rest nor sleep, / Nor guard from them nor hide in flight” – The Immortals). Equally, there were great obstacles in the way of the acceptance of each into
*Although Sassoon was of Jewish descent, he was christened in the Church of England, as were his forebears and he came from several generations of English gentry. This saved him from the discrimination that Rosenberg would have come across constantly, as a second-generation, practising, working class Jewish immigrant.
the literary elite. Both this commonality and the different ways these obstacles affected them are evident in their verse. This makes Rosenberg and Owen a particularly illuminating pair to compare and contrast.
Isaac Rosenberg, after returning to England from South Africa where he had been convalescing, enlisted soon after the war began. Owen, also abroad at the outbreak of the war (he was in France working as a private tutor) did not join up until September 1915 after visiting a hospital and becoming acquainted with many of the war’s wounded. Deeply affected, the 22-year-old Owen decided to join the war effort. He wrote at the time, “ I came out in order to help these boys- directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching the sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first” – (letter home, September 1915). This gives us some insight into the purpose of his work.
Rosenberg, on the other hand, a graduate of the Slade School of Art, could not find work for a portrait painter during wartime. In order to support his ageing parents, he joined the 12th Suffolk regiment's ‘bantam’ battalion (so called because it was for men under five feet three inches tall) and thus obtained a separation allowance for his mother. This was a very different rationale.
These selfless aims add an edge of poignance to the work of each. The scope of Owen’s ambition is, however, characteristically broader. Their relative descriptions of the dead and dying are particularly indicative. In the poems ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, probably Rosenberg’s most deeply felt, and Futility, a particularly reflective and lyrical piece for Owen, both describe the bodies of the dead after a battle.
Rosenberg recounts a horrific scene (“The wheels lurched... bones crunched”) then asks what has happened to the souls of the dead soldiers who, only a few minutes before “strode time with vigorous life”. He wonders how their souls could have left them so unnoticed, so quietly, and how it was that
“None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth”.
With the terms ‘doomed nostrils...doomed mouth” and “wild honey of their youth,” Rosenberg appears, in point of fact to be echoing Owen’s phrase ‘doomed youth’, although there is no evidence as to who may have influenced whom, or if it was mere coincidence. At the very least, it suggests a deep affinity.
Here, Rosenberg’s bewilderment that a simple bullet or piece of shrapnel could have blotted out the lives of these young men is quite apparent. The repeated ‘s’ sound becomes the sound of the wind (or spirits) blowing over the grass. This stanza, in which Rosenberg encapsulates his confusion and disillusionment with the futility of war, is perhaps the heart of the poem. Its power, however, is mitigated by the fact that it is sandwiched between long passages where Rosenberg, frankly, allows himself to ramble. Owen’s early drafts may also have wandered: what we know is that the verse that has come down to us does not.
Both are economical with poetic devices. Although little earlier Rosenberg has employed a dull repetition in the line “From night till night and now” that effectively portrays the endless monotony of trench warfare, this is unusual.
In this, as in other respects, Futility is deliberate and sparing. In the alliterative “At home, whispering of fields unsown,” the repeated ‘s’s likewise represent the wind blowing over a field. The effect is vital to the poem, as the sound of the wind is possibly the same that “always...woke him, even in France,” the wind which whispered to the dead man on a sunny morning, reminding him of tasks not completed. With the line the central concept is given weight and form, as within it, we can almost hear what it is that “gently... woke” him when he was home, and which the poem’s narrator forlornly hopes will rouse him from his final sleep. The difference is that this is spare and stands out from, rather than being lost in, the text: no word is wasted.
While echoing Rosenberg’s anguished incomprehension of the fragility of the lives of men, of the senseless destruction of the “limbs, so dear-achieved,” Owen does not express the brutal horror that Rosenberg felt so intensely. Although his trademark half –rhymes such as “sun...unsown”, “once...France”, “seeds...sides” lend a certain discomfort,
Owen’s use is not so extreme as elsewhere (from Exposure- “snow...renew”,
“fruit...afraid” from Strange Meeting “escaped...scooped”). He even goes so far as to complete couplets with the occasional full rhyme (“Until this morning and this snow.... The kind old sun will know,”).
He starts with what is seemingly a more optimistic, gentle sentiment- the hope that a dead man can be woken up (“Move him into the sun/ Gently its touch awoke him once,”) But that, of course, is impossible, the young life cannot be given back by the sun’s warmth. He is already “too hard to stir,” (like Rosenberg’s dead man “sunk too deep”) and nothing can revive him. The over arching emotion, therefore, is of a different quality to Rosenberg’s shock and anguish; it is devastatingly poignant, pathetic. Owen is already heart broken. He can no longer be shocked into revulsion like Rosenberg and we are not distracted by extraneous musings.
Dead Man’s Dump is atypical of Rosenberg; its impassioned, emotional language, his anguished questions, (“Who hurled them out? / Who hurled?”), which sound as if they were written to be shouted, show a marked contrast to his other work. For instance Break of Day in the Trenches and Louse Hunting are notable for a detachment that is almost whimsical. They lack the overpowering fury and guilt of Dead Man’s Dump. Fury and guilt at being alive are for instance expressed in the lines (“What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, / Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, / Our lucky limbs as if on ichor fed,/
Immortal seeming ever?”). These qualities, tellingly, characterise Owen’s poetry. Because of course, in its disillusionment, its inability to grasp why, if they were destined to simply die, did earth see fit to give these young men life at all, in its declaration that
“Earth has waited for them
All the time of their youth
Fretting for their decay”,
this poem is thematically identical to Owen’s Futility.
Similarly, both personify a facet of nature but for entirely different ends. Rosenberg sees the earth, Owen the sun, as a seemingly irrational giver and taker of life. It is reasonable to suppose that the culprits here metaphorically represented are the true orchestrators of their lives, the generals who planned and executed the war. Rosenberg, in his anguish and consequent ferocity, characterises earth as cruel and malicious, waiting to take the lives of men and hide them away forever (“Earth has waited for them, / All the time of their growth/ Fretting for their decay” and “Earth! have they gone into you! / Somewhere they must have gone/ And flung on your hard back/ Is their soul’s sack”) Owen’s sun, more subtly, is apparently a kind and merciful saviour and reviver of the dead (“ If anything might rouse him now/ The kind old sun will know.”). The blind trust of the ordinary soldier that those in charge know what they are doing is just as futile as the belief that the sun will bring a man back to life. It is almost as if the sun was the “cheery old card” of Sassoon’s The General and the epithet “fatuous”, a personal upbraiding. Owen’s irony is no more effective than Rosenberg’s literal representation. The greater power of Owen’s verse is almost entirely a function of the shortness of the piece.
Such differences in tone are typical of the disparities between Owen and Rosenberg’s treatment of very similar subject matter.
Futility’s furious line of questioning on the death of a young man- “Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides/ Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir? / Was it for this the clay grew tall? / - O what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth’s sleep at all?” echoes Rosenberg’s description of the lives of those dead as “half used”. The poets share the feeling that death was visited upon these men too early, that their lives were unceremoniously cut short.
Rosenberg is perhaps more experimental: possibly a benefit of his isolation. The verse of Dead Man’s Dump does not have a uniform rhyme pattern; the first few stanzas rhyme only intermittently- the middle of the second stanza (“Their shut mouths made no moan. / They lie there huddled, friend and foeman / Man born of man, and born of woman”) rhyming in order to emphasize its point that, German or English, all men are the same, all “born of man, and born of woman,” none make any noise and all “lie there huddled” indiscriminately. All men come from the same place and all eventually die. This sentiment, a dark argument for equality, has increased significance when one considers Rosenberg’s Judaism, and the isolation and discrimination he suffered. The experimentation is that of the outsider with no stake in convention.
So, the stanzas that follow suggest that Rosenberg was unconcerned with structured rhyme scheme (“What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit/ Earth! have they gone into you! / Somewhere they must have gone”), only using rhyme in order to alert our attention as in the second stanza, and in the fifth -“None saw their spirits shadow shake the grass/ Or stood...” The seemingly chaotic and careless style is deliberately employed to create a specific atmosphere, its disjointed structure evoking the disjointed thoughts of a soldier under fire and the uneasiness the narrator feels.
By contrast, there is of course a uniform ABAB pattern of half rhymes in the main body of Futility. The last lines rhyme fully. At first this device creates a sense of uneasiness. Owen then emphasises and concludes his ideas with the misleadingly more comfortable and definite sound of a full rhyme at the end of the stanza, which expresses and then subverts comfort and hope. This is brilliant, subtle and effective, but perhaps less anarchic than Rosenberg.
The perspective of Dead Man’s Dump shifts abruptly in the ninth verse, from abstract musings on the fate of “sprawled dead” to an account of the ‘narrator’s’ day, written as a witness, seemingly as the events unfold; the brains of a dead man spray all over the man who is carrying his stretcher, and when he looks at the face of the dying man, he is already too remote, “sunk too deep for human tenderness”. The body is dumped on to a pile of bodies “stretched at the cross roads” representing the physical cross roads between two roads, and the metaphorical junction between life and death. This is as effective as anything in Owen.
The perspective of Futility shifts also, though less overtly, in the third line of the last verse. The pitiful hope that the man may still be saved, the desperate attempts to rationalise that hope (“Always it woke him.... Think how it wakes the seeds, -/ Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.”) are no longer apparent, instead Owen is left with anger, confusion and disillusionment. He is no longer concealing his true sentiments: he, like Rosenberg, simply cannot comprehend the meaningless loss of these lives and is unable to entertain the idea that they had lived only to die-
“O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?”.
Rosenberg’s last two stanzas tell of a dying man who longs for the ambulance cart to come. It arrives just too late, and its wheels go over his dead face. Rosenberg evokes with uncomfortable realism the dying man’s last, desperate, disjointed thoughts, using words with horrific implications such as “choked”, “blood-dazed” and “tortured” to give the reader a sense of an atmosphere dangerous, violent and tortuous. This language recalls Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est (“coughing like hags,” “blood-shod,” “guttering, choking, drowning” “blood...Come gargling forth from froth-corrupted lungs”).
The poems have abrupt endings in common. Their final piteous stanzas, make no attempt to explain the events recounted. Their anguished conclusions, Owen finishing on one final unanswered (and unanswerable) question (“-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/ To break earth’s sleep at all?”), and the similarly pathetic but less artful dying fall in Rosenberg’s last, unconcluded stanza (“We heard his weak scream, / We heard his very last sound, / And our wheels grazed his dead face.”) tell us something of Rosenberg’s and Owen’s own personal sense of helplessness and futility.
Whether we judge on the music of the words, the employment of figures of speech or the power of the poetic expression, Rosenberg at his best is Owen’s equal. The difference between these poems is that Owen’s fourteen lines of genius are all he gave us, while Rosenberg’s are effectively hidden in a work more than six times the length.
Both of these poems raise more questions than answers. The very lack of closure evinces an overpowering knowledge that these two men had died, thousands more had died, thousands more would die and there was nothing they could do.
Henrietta Ashworth April 2003
