Features / World War I
Bristol’s War: Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg
Isaac Rosenberg, generally considered one of the finest of Britain’s war poets, was born on November 25, 1890 in Bristol’s Temple neighbourhood. He may have been born at 5 Victoria Square (which no longer exists), though he certainly lived at Adelaide Place for a while as a child. There is now a blue plaque near the site at the corner of Somerset Street and Clarence Rd.
His parents were Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Russia and the family lived in desperate poverty; the area was a notorious slum at the time. They moved to London when he was still a child.
On leaving school he was apprenticed to an engraver, and later studied at the Slade School of Art. Rosenberg was a gifted artist, but by the time war broke out he believed that his future was as a poet. He joined the army in 1915 not for patriotic motives, but because he and his family needed the money.
He was an indifferent soldier; he hated the idea of killing and disliked army discipline and the anti-Semitism from some of his comrades.
He wrote to a friend: “I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over.”
Nonetheless, the war prompted some of his best poetry. His talent, according to some critics, came from his working-class background, very different from the glamorous young officer-poets, but also from his training as an artist. Rosenberg’s poetry always had a powerful visual, descriptive quality which never flinched from the horrors he saw:
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan,
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.
Earth has waited for them
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
He was killed by a German raiding-party at dawn on April 1, 1918. He was 27 years old.
This is one of over 100 tales of Bristol in the First World War written by Eugene Byrne for Bristol 2014 and available on a free smartphone app, Great War Stories. Details and downloads at http://www.bristol2014.com/great-war-stories-map-and-app.html
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