IT WAS Eliot who suggested that the fundamental interests of a poet’s work do not alter, that a poet cannot change the content of his work — what it is he has to say — but only the way in which he says it. The poetry of Rosenberg illustrates this axiom with a revealing clarity. From Night and Day, the pamphlet published in 1912 when the poet was twenty-two, through the development which culminated in the fragmentary drafts of the verse play, The Unicorn, on which he was working for almost a year up to his death in 1918, there persists a radical unity of interest. From the beginning, Rosenberg realised with the certainty of genius, the questions that he was called upon, that he was fated to answer in his poetry. There are no false starts in Night and Day, merely the absence of a technique. The things which were to concern him throughout his short life are all stated there, but they lack poetic realisation and the completeness of experience. His problem was to find for their embodiment, along with the exact technical means, a myth which would be adequate to contain them all and present them within the scope of a single poem. He first attempted this in the play Moses (1916) which is divided from Night and Day by the subtle technical advance of Youth (1915). The myth which he sought in Moses demanded a greater completeness. It was this which he was occupied in bringing to expression in his unfinished The Unicorn, divided again from the earlier work by that period of intensive technical concentration which resulted in his finest work, the Trench Poems of 1916 to 1918.

     The title poem of Night and Day consists of a longish piece of late Pre-Raphaelitism in which there combine loping Swinburnian rhythms, the onomatopoeia of Francis Thompson, echoes of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyám and cadences from the Bible. Rosenberg was to slough off the gaudiness of Pre-Raphaelitism as his verse became more robust, but, like Hopkins, he retained its central Keatsian term, ‘Beauty’, and was still redefining this term in the last draft of his last work, The Unicorn. ‘Beauty’, says the Nubian in The Amulet which was the first version of this unfinished playlet, ‘is a great paradox’ —

Music’s secret soul creeping about the senses
To wrestle with man’s coarser nature.

     Rosenberg’s related use of the words ‘beauty’ and ‘music’, a juxtaposition linked with his recurrent theme of stoical acceptance of one’s fate, persists throughout his work from the immature Night and Day. Here, the poet’s moments of insight are conveyed in four songs. First Desire sings a song of immortality, then Hope a song of love and Beauty a song of the eternal rhythm. The ‘proud stars’ which in the poem are associated with the pervasive theme of fate are silent until, at the very end, the song of the evening star is heard. It is significant that Rosenberg ends with the song of the evening star counterpointing the silence of the proud stars, ‘the steadfast eyes of Fate’. What he tries for and what he cannot yet achieve is a symbolic statement in which a balance is to be struck between the poet’s surrender to his fate and his conception of life’s full possibilities—the ‘strange wine/Of some large knowledge,’ which comes to him in the four songs. The equation sought for (to venture an abstract and inadequate formula) is one in which desire, hope, beauty and fate stand on the one side and music on the other, and Rosenberg’s development was bound up with finding the right poetic means to convince us that this equation can be true.

     Moses reaches its climax in a lengthy image of harmony. At the moments of dramatic intensity in the play, where a new possibility seems about to impinge on the degraded and enslaved Jews in a world where the forest has become a park, the wolf a dog, the horse put into harness and ‘man’s mind in a groove’, music is used to hint the potential dissolution of that world once it is challenged. Moses reflects on his own untamed nature and the new knowledge of full human possibilities which has come to him; he expresses its opposite in the recurring Rosenbergian image of sleep, spiritual sleep in which possibilities are passing unused, and a singing voice takes up his theme. When Abinoah, the overseer, beats an old Jew, an aged minstrel sings from the distance,

Taut is the air and tied the trees,
The leaves lie as on a hand.
God’s unthinkable imagination
Invents new tortures for nature.

The minstrel, drawing imperceptibly nearer, goes on to sing:

Ye who best God awhile — O, hear your wealth
Is but His cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy although you die to sell.

The song is addressed to Abinoah and the Jews’ oppressors, those who have built a world of ‘priests and forms’ where ‘the unsoldered spirit lies limp’. They, too, though the masters of it, are so involved in this world that the spiritual dimension Moses rediscovers within himself and which he would restore to the slaves, is impossible for them. Deceived by the reassurance of apparent mastery, they have, in ‘besting’ God awhile, merely put off for the time being their own fate — indeed ‘God’ and ‘fate’ are frequently interchangeable words with Rosenberg. They can never experience the possibilities of total being: thus their ‘beauty’ is unrealised and unrealisable. The ‘market’ for their beauty, ‘too poor to buy’, introduces again implicitly Rosenberg’s notion of fate: the taskmasters are robbed of any real destiny because there is no conceivable situation in which their beauty, their spiritual dimension which has grown void, could be called upon to play a significant part: spiritual timidity, masked by apparent mastery, has impoverished all possible futures. The comment, as I have said, is made in song and thus acquires the right degree of emphasis within the symbolism of the whole. The ‘aged minstrel’ who sings it finally throws off his disguise and reveals himself as Moses, the figure whose fate it is to lead the slaves and to teach them a new largeness of being.

     Before discussing the final passage of the play in which the musical metaphor receives its fullest expansion, it would perhaps be more enlightening to examine the poetic concept represented by Moses himself, so as to observe the way Rosenberg qualifies and enriches this with the concept of music. For the closing speech, dominated by the image of harmony, completes this process.

     In Moses all that has been excluded from the self of ordinary men, the slaves of the play, is reasserted. In a passage which D. W. Harding (‘Aspects of the Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg’, Scrutiny, Vol. III, p. 358) chooses to illustrate the poet’s kaleidoscopic use of images, Moses expresses the pristine, more than human nature of his genius. This violent and prophetic energy is conveyed, as Professor Harding notes, by ‘a rapid skimming from one metaphor to another’:

Fine! Fine!
See in my brain
What madmen have rushed through,
And like a tornado
Torn up the tight roots
Of some dead universe.
The old clay is broken
For a power to soak in and knit
It all into tougher tissues
To hold life,
Pricking my nerves till the brain might crack
It boils to my finger-tips,
Till my hands ache to grip
The hammer — the lone hammer
That breaks lives into a road
Through which my genius drives . . .

After this, with its implied progression from the uprooting storm which will tear yet revivify the dead, settled aspect of things, and from the fertility of a renewed earth to the ideal and mission which this renewal makes possible, the poet feels the need to restate and stabilise the sense of strangeness and the unknown which Moses feels within himself. The unresolved elements of those images of madness and of ambition need a more conscious ordering to satisfy us, but the effect of untamed energy must not be lost. Rosenberg brings off the restatement with one of his most exact and most penetrating touches:

I am rough now, and new, and will have no tailor.
Startlingly,
As a mountain side
Wakes aware of its other side,
When from a cave a leopard comes,
On its heels the same red sand,
Springing with acquainted air
Sprang an intelligence
Coloured as a whim of mine
Showed to my dull outer eyes
The living eyes underneath.

The allied images of the mountainside and the leopard, unmoving vastness and stealthy animal power, underline the unshakeable yet plastic determination of Moses, but what is doubly telling is the idea of the inanimate mountain rousing suddenly into consciousness, into a full awareness of all that it is, and the exactness with which, both leopard and mountain enact this movement of Moses’ own mind as it comes to a realisation of its unknown powers. One notes the verbal ambiguity whereby mountain and leopard are united by the poet in a single act: ‘Startlingly/As a mountainside/Wakes aware of its other side . . . Sprang an intelligence’. In the syntactic link logic has been completely ignored. The ‘intelligence’ has already received its embodiment as the leopard, which I have omitted here, but it receives its syntactic sanction from ‘As a mountain side/Wakes . . .‘ The syntactic entanglement comes about as a result of the pressure at which Rosenberg allows thought and words to interact and is justified by its expressive completeness.

     Leopard and mountain combine, then, to qualify by their stark natural’ purity the images of madness and ambition which have preceded them. But Rosenberg envisages a greater fullness for the symbolic role of Moses, a relliance between primal energies and conscious purpose, and it is with this that the play deals in its closing scene.

     The sense of a possible harmony, a refocusing of that which is potential in human nature but which fixed attitudes, and conditions turn stagnant, is conveyed most strongly in the last speech of Moses to Abinoah, the Egyptian overseer. Moses tells him his ‘plans’ and kills him as the first step in the realisation of those plans. The harmony which the speech of Moses embodies is thus sharply pointed against the actuality of immediate violence which must precede it. The uncertainty of its attainment provides a further balancing stress with the ultimate arrest of Moses who has been betrayed by Abinoah. Rosenberg leaves the Biblical story in mid-air and surely means one’s final feeling to be, not that Moses did, after all, lead the Jews out of Egypt, but that here, within the narrower scheme of the playlet and by implication within that of our own world, the emergence and triumph of a life renewed by primitive vigour and made complete by ‘largeness’ of understanding, remains in suspension. The speech opens with one of those images which, like that of the leopard, carries a complete and personal felicity for the impersonal hope which is being expressed: ‘Look round on the night’, says Moses to Abinoah,

Old as the first, bleak, even her wish is done;
She has never seen, though dreamt perhaps of the sun,
Yet only dawn divides; could a miracle
Destroy the dawn, night would be mixed with light,
No night or light would be, but a new thing.
So with these slaves, who perhaps have dreamt of freedom,
Egypt was in the way . . .

The ‘new thing’, that which Moses would realise, derives its poetic life from the way the imagined possibility of a chaos in nature represents at the same time a new ordering, an image which unites the primal forces and the conscious in the union of night with light. ‘She has never seen, though dreamt perhaps of the sun,/Yet only dawn divides.’ The line and a half condense both the Jewish spiritual plight (‘So with these slaves, who perhaps have dreamt of freedom . . .’) and, a sense emerging beneath that, this feeling of might as a pristine, subconscious force which breaks its own limitations to become the constituent in a wider awareness. When Moses goes on to elaborate this hope it is, significantly, the night-side of being, the suppressed half which floods in to give us the immediate intuition of a new fullness and not, as D. H. Lawrence would say, the mental consciousness which evolves the cause:

I have a trouble in my mind for largeness,
Rough-hearted, shaggy, which your grave ardours lack.
Here is the quarry quiet for me to hew,
Here are the springs, primeval elements,
The roots’ hid secrecy, old source of race,
Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct.

     Dr. Leavis has compared the radically religious attitude of the poet with that of Lawrence (‘The Recognition of Isaac Rosenberg’, Scrutiny, Vol. VI, p. 229) and the Lawrentian element is clearly evident here. ‘We must,’ says Lawrence, ‘make a great swerve in our outward-going life course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries,’ and qualifies this with: ‘We cannot go back to the savages: not a stride. We can be in sympathy with them. We can take a great curve in their direction, onwards. But we cannot turn the current of our own life backwards.’ And Rosenberg’s qualification (but in poetic terms, of course) resembles Lawrence’s as does his basic attitude. To make the poetic statement of the night-light imagery more complete, the ‘Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct’, then, must be tempered, and the qualification which follows it is marked by a new closeness of phrasing and a new certainty in the rhythm. The balancing effect of this is prepared for, in small, in the four prelusive lines:

I’d shape one impulse through the contraries
Of vain ambitious men, selfish and callous,
And frail life-drifters, reticent, delicate.
Litheness thread bulk, a nation’s harmony.

Rosenberg attempts to span the differentiated weaknesses ‘selfish and callous’, ‘reticent, delicate’ of two types of the all-too-human, and effect the gathering up into harmony (‘Litheness thread bulk . . .’) without any repetition of verb, relying on there being enough verbal carry-over from ‘I’d’ to cement ‘Litheness thread bulk’ to the rest. The effect is hardly convincing, but the ensuing ‘nation’s harmony’ is consolidated in the equipoise of what follows:

These are not lame, nor bent awry, but placeless
With rust and stagnant. All that’s low I’ll charm;
Barbaric love sweeten to tenderness.
Cunning run into wisdom, craft turn to skill.
Their meanness threaded right and sensibly
Change to a prudence, envied and not sneered.
Their hugeness be a driving wedge to a thing,
Ineffable and usable, as near
Solidity as human life can be.
So grandly fashion these rude elements
Into some newer nature, a consciousness
Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul . . .

The passage grows out of the primitive ‘Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct’ to an image of full consciousness. Its craggy, plunging energy mimes this growth as it moves from term to term. Each term that is ‘rough . . . new, and will have no tailor’ (bulk, barbaric love, hugeness) is poised against a humanising, subtilising counterpart: litheness, tenderness, ‘a driving wedge’. Similarly, the fallen elements, cunning, craft, meanness (the commonest adjectives of the anti-Semite and the speech is addressed, be it noted, to Abinoah who ‘has one obsession, hatred of Jews’) are juxtaposed by wisdom, skill, prudence. The terms balance out into ‘solidity’, with its sense of physical rootedness, combining with the spiritual insight of ‘a consciousness/Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul.’ And throughout the passage, coming as it does at the play’s climax, the potentialities to which it points are ordered by and focused upon the significance of partaking of a meaningful destiny. It contains the antithesis to that static, destiny-less Egyptian world of priests and forms.

     While it is not my intention here to discuss at any length either details of biography or the shorter poems—both have been succinctly dealt with D. W. Harding and also by Marius Bewley (‘The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg’, Commentary, New York, Vol. VIII, p. 34)— some reference to these is necessary before proceeding to The Unicorn. Moses is not in itself as complete a poetic statement as the greatest of the war poems, but it was a necessary step towards their more balanced and sparer style. ‘This concept of energy and power’, says Mr. Bewley, ‘became in one way or another an integral part of Rosenberg’s imagery . . . But such concepts if they mean anything in art, can be neither arbitrarily devised nor assumed.’ And it was precisely the experience of war and Rosenberg’s total acceptance of the experience which gave that greater force and moral depth to his imagery of stoicism and power which was to be ultimately embodied in Daughters of War. The passage in his letters is now famous in which he writes of his desire to open himself unreservedly to this total demand: ‘I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life . . .’ The history of this acceptance, the wish to make of his life a destiny as M. Sartre would say, is to be traced throughout these letters from the early struggles with poverty to the impact of war. Before 1911 (the letter is undated) he writes to his correspondent, Miss Winifreda Seaton, of ‘the fiendish persistence of the coil of circumstances’: ‘I have tried to make some sort of self-adjustment to the circumstances by saying, “It is all experience”: but, good God! it is all experience and nothing else.’ There is both revolt against circumstances and a final recognition that they can be transmuted, but transmuted only if accepted: ‘I believe’, he goes on, ‘however hard one’s lot is, one ought to try and accommodate oneself to the conditions; and except in a case of purely physical pain, I think it can be done . . . I endeavour to waste nothing.’ And already one finds him expressing the sense of potential mastery in the image of music that he will revert to continually: ‘To most people life is a musical instrument on which they are unable to play: but in the musician’s hands it becomes a living thing.’

     The parallel history of acceptance in the poems appears in its first convincing personal expression with ‘God Made Blind’ from Youth and then is objectified into the legend of Moses. The more personal instance is renewed once more in Trench Poems, but however close or terrible the experience, it is recorded without accusation (irony disappears completely) and with all the strength of inner calm. With the unfinished playlet, The Unicorn, written from the centre of this accepted experience of war, Rosenberg was moving outward once more to extend both technique and symbolism as he had done previously in Moses. The Unicorn remained incomplete at his death. One wonders how, under the circumstances, the drafts came to be written at all.

     The first of these drafts, The Amulet, resumes something of the violence of language which characterises Moses. The violence is more qualified, however, by the presence of a central calm, by the maturity of a stable attitude which appears in the speeches of the Nubian, Rosenberg’s version of the figure of power. The Nubian possesses, as we shall see, a humanity that would not have been possible at the stage of Moses.

     Between The Amulet and The Unicorn, the last draft, the symbolic intention widens. In the first of these playlets the Nubian is, among other things, the embodied challenge of original vitality and creative possibility to the humdrum marriage of Saul and Lilith. In the second, the failure of human creativity in this relation is given a wider context by the Nubian’s reappearance as Tel, the prince of ‘some strange race of wanderers . . . perishing out for lack of women’, who has plotted a kind of Sabine rape on the natives of a near-by country. It is significant (as we learn from the letters) that Tel was originally intended by Rosenberg to be trapped in the act. Like that of Moses, the situation was (until the final draft came to be written) to have been left suspended. This fear of wasted possibilities which runs through the letters and through Moses appears side by side with the growing realisation of the need for tragic acceptance. The two themes are explored most interestingly in The Amulet. Despite the extended symbolical basis of The Unicorn (there is a tentative sketchiness about some of the writing where, at times, one gets the impression that the kaleidoscopic style of parts of Moses has thinned to a kind of nerveless impressionism), the most evenly achieved section of this final work occurs in the interview between Lilith and the Nubian in The Amulet.

     Rosenberg was right to feel (as one suspects he must have done) that the amulet itself was too much of a donnée to be ultimately effective and to attempt a wider symbolism. The Nubian, having impinged upon the existence of Saul and Lilith in which love has been wasted until it scarcely exists, brings with him an amulet containing, presumably, ‘the missing secret’, the formula for what love ought to be, and Lilith’s child, Amak, tears up the contained scroll on which this is written. The symbol is, of course, far too ad hoc, but the relation between Lilith and the Nubian is excellently realised.

     Saul, having been helped by the Nubian to bring home his cart through a storm, lies sleeping as the playlet opens. The Nubian is baking cakes on the embers while Lilith stills the child, Amak, from waking his father. Her eye caught by the Nubian’s jade amulet which the child has picked up, she re-creates the appearance of the former before Saul on the storm-swept road.

 . . . The slime clung
And licked and clawed and chewed the clogged dragging wheels
Till they sunk right to the axle. Saul sodden and vexed
Like fury smote the mules’ mouths, pulling but sweat
From his drowned hair and theirs, while the thunder knocked
And all the air yawned water, falling water,
And the light cart was water, like a wrecked raft,
And all seemed like a forest under the ocean.
Sudden the lightning flashed upon a figure
Moving as a man moves in the slipping mud
But singing not as a man sings, through the storm,
Which could not drown his sounds . . .

What is particularly effective about this introduction is the way it emerges starkly from the plain domesticity of the opening, of Lilith’s speech (‘Amak, you’ll break your father’s sleep, /Come here and tell me what those spices are/This strange man bakes our cakes with.’), and, preceded by Lilith’s description of Saul’s awakened state of mind, the quiet tone of domesticity returns, though heightened by wonder and anticipation:

Saul and the man leaped in, Saul miserably sodden
Marvelled at the large cheer in a naked glistening man,
And soon fell in with that contented mood,
That when our hut’s light broke on his new mind
He could not credit it. Too soon it seemed.
The strange man’s talk was witchery.
I pray his baking be as magical.
The cakes should be nigh burnt.

In Rosenberg’s confrontation of the strange and the familiar — the two brought close in the suggestive promise of the cakes the gigantic Negro is cooking with spices the smell of which ‘makes the brain wild’ — the themes of the playlet are dramatically enunciated. Domesticity and the loss of love, hinted in Saul’s ‘sleep’ and later developed, are symbolically challenged by the appearance of the Nubian; and Lilith, cramped within their narrowing circle, can see in him the dimensions of that unknown reality from which her experience of waste has excluded her:

Was it the storm-spirit, storm’s pilot
With all the heaving débris of Noah’s sunken days
Dragged on his loins,
Law’s spirit wandering to us
Through Nature’s anarchy,
Wandering towards us when the Titans yet were young?

     As in the case of Moses, Rosenberg wishes to define the extent of his sympathy with the primitive. The Nubian, then, is associated not merely with ‘Nature’s anarchy’, the chaos of the storm, but with ‘Law’s spirit’. It is this dual conception in Lilith’s mind that prefaces their discussion of the nature of tragic experience which is centred in a passage where, once again, the image of music returns. The passage — it is evident Rosenberg regarded it as being one of the symbol’s foci for the completed play — was transposed into The Unicorn in the form of a song accompanied on the viol. In The Amulet law and music are associated in the steady contemplation of the nature of tragic acceptance and are opposed to those ‘Pulses straining against strictness/Because an easy issue lies therefrom.’ And in Rosenberg’s use of the primitive giant in this context of total acceptance there is also a resonance which recalls Nietzsche’s definition of the Dionysiac in his Twilight of the Idols: ‘The affirmative answer to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life, rejoicing in the sacrifice, of its highest types, at its own inexhaustible nature — that I called Dionysiac.’

     Seeing in the Nubian a wanderer whose journeyings through time and space have acquainted him with the kinds of both joy and suffering — with life experienced at its most intense — Lilith introduces obliquely her own misgivings:

I think there is more sorrow in the world
Than man can bear.

— a plangency to which the Nubian responds with plain, stoic brevity:

None can exceed their limit, lady:
You either bear or break.

But Lilith, willing to use the language of tragedy only with the valuation that her self-dramatising puts on to it, at once tries to re-establish the tone of her first tentative introduction:

Can one choose to break? To bear,
To wearily bear, is misery.
Beauty is this corroding malady.

In doing so she seeks to invest the word ‘beauty’ (i.e. her physical and spiritual latency, wasted by circumstances) with the sense of inevitable doom, with the full Romantic overtones of splendour combined with sickness and to take emotional refuge in the self-indulgence of that definition. And behind it one feels the Keatsian collocation of beauty with melancholy, the painful realisation that lent itself so easily to the poetic stance and morbid gratification of a poet who had meant a great deal to Rosenberg, namely Rossetti.* The Nubian, however, urges that there is a definition of beauty more important than the Romantic one and in the light of which one no longer sees one’s own sorrows as occupying the very centre of things, a definition again tempered by a stoical resignation to the prospect of loss:

Beauty is a great paradox —
Music’s secret soul, creeping about the senses
To wrestle with man’s coarser nature.
It is hard when beauty loses.

But she turns away once more from the measured contemplation, the plastic and dynamic concept offered by the Nubian: beauty is a lie, a compensation for mankind’s failures:

I think beauty is a bad bargain made of life.
Men's iron sinews hew them room in the world
And use deceits to gain them trophies.
O, when our beauty fails us did we not use
Deceits, where were our room in the world —
Only our room in the world?

And it is here, as she reasserts her own subjective values of fear and self-pity, that she assumes the mythical associations of her name — Lilith, the demonic Lamia figure of the Talmud — but her mythical self remains uneasily and imperfectly submerged in her identity as a woman, and her Romanticism, the measure of her sickness, is an inadequate bridge between these two selves:

Are not the songs and devices of men
Moulds they have made after my scarlet mouth,
Of cunning words and haughty contours of bronze
And viols and gathered air?
They without song have sung me
Boldly and shamelessly.
I am no wanton, no harlot;
I have been pleased and smiled my pleasure,
I am a wife with a woman’s natural ways.
Yet through the shadow of the pomegranates
Filters a poison day by day,
And to a malady turns
The blond, the ample music of my heart.

But, against her rhetoric, as her attention focuses upon the amulet, the Nubian presses the necessity of moderation, refusing to tragic feeling (with a humanity of tone quite absent, say, in the dealings of Moses with the all-too-human weaknesses of his mistress, Koelue, in the earlier play), the evasive and self-congratulatory inflations of excess:

Small comfort is counsel to broken lives,
But tolerance is medicinal.
In all our textures are loosed
Pulses straining against strictness
Because an easy issue lies therefrom.

     The amulet is destroyed and the relation between Lilith and the Nubian left unresolved. Rosenberg attempted to broaden the symbolic setting and also to explore the feelings of Saul (again a character whose failure to expose himself to the complete possibility of life, to experience all, that his love had made potential relates to Rosenberg’s principal concerns). But with the dramatised expansion in The Unicorn of the storm scene — which seems a device inferior to Lilith’s succinct and domestically ‘enclosed’ narration — and the myth of the dying race, he was unable to achieve in this draft either the cohesion or the completeness of the first interview between Lilith and the Nubian. Writing from the trenches in 1916, Rosenberg speaks of the skin that must grow ‘round and through’ a poet’s ideas if they are to be presented whole, and adds: ‘If you are not free, you can only, where the ideas come hot, seize them with the skin in tatters, raw, crude, in some parts beautiful, in others monstrous.’ In reading these fragmentary drafts, one should bear the comment in mind. Situated as he was, one of the gauges of Rosenberg’s tough impersonality is that, in the chaos of trench conditions, it was in the concept of music that he sought to stabilise and to express the steady contemplation and acceptance of his fate and to order into art the transcended consciousness of waste.