The Female God of Isaac Rosenberg: A Muse for Wartime

The Female God of Isaac Rosenberg: A Muse for Wartime Beth Ellen Roberts Tulane University SINCE HIS DEATH on the fields of France toward the end of World War I, the poetry of the poet-artist-soldier Isaac Rosenberg has suffered from what Marius Bewley described as a "churlish neglect," despite the posthumous publication of several editions of his work.1 Several of his "Trench Poems," particularly "Break of Day in the Trenches" and "Dead Man's Dump," appear regularly in anthologies of war poetry, but the remaining poems defy easy classification and have thus been excluded from most collections. Attempts have been made to identify the work of Rosenberg as Georgian, Vorticist, Imagist, Classic or Romantic. None of these labels fits well. Aside from the difficulty in categorizing Rosenberg's work in order to include him in anthologies and scholarship, the relative inaccessibility of his poetry has also led to its neglect. Even within his lifetime, Rosenberg battled the conception of his poetry as being vague. In a 1915 letter to Sydney Schiff, Rosenberg thanked him for taking the time to read his poems, noting "most people find them difficult and wont [sic] be bothered with them."2 He even joked about the polite but puzzled responses he received frequently from readers of his verse: "People are always telling me my work is promising —incomprehensible, but promising. . . ."3 Rosenberg's isolation from recongnizable mainstreams also stands in opposition to what Samuel Hynes has identified in The War Imagined as a crisis for English poetry at the onset of World War I. The pastoral tradition had done nothing to prepare English artists for the war; English culture required time to integrate the reality of the struggle into its history. In August 1914, many writers experienced an inability to work, among them Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Rupert Brooke. "It was as though," writes Hynes, "the declaration of war, simply 319 ELT 39:3 1996 by being uttered, had destroyed the conditions under which art could be created."4 The culture that produced Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), however, that of the Chasidic Jewry of Eastern Europe, had long acquaintance with war, evil and the expression of those concepts in its art. Rather than paralyzing him, August 1914 unleashed in Rosenberg a quality and productivity which had stagnated until that time. The oral tradition of the Chasidic Jews included many stories of the supernatural world, which with their vivid portrayals of otherworldly battles, their depictions of the forces of good and evil, and their characterizations of sin provided Rosenberg with a framework for an exploration of the world around him, a world at war. Before the onset of the war, he wrote fairly commonplace, imitative love poetry; but when the hostilities commenced , he began to produce original adaptations of these legends which illustrated the unsettled times. For one reason or another, Rosenberg failed to reveal the source of his imagery and thus an important key to decoding his poetry. Even without a complete understanding of the Chasidic legends as background to his poems, critics have explored a number of recurring images and themes, including root and tree imagery, the poet's relationship with God and the war. One startling and persistent image which appears in his work from the onset of the war until his death is the concept of a female supernatural force. Several poems illustrate the power of this female will, including "Daughters of War" which portrays the Daughters as immortal Amazons, sensual and imperative, who lure men away from mortal bodies to become their mates. By far the most compelling use of this image among his poems occurs in "The Female God," in which the feminine power vanquishes the Old Testament masculine God. Because critics have generally regarded this poem as an example of Rosenberg's highly original vision, few have attempted to identify a source for the conception of the female god.5 Although some have taken particular care to deny his identity as a Jewish poet and minimize the importance of the Jewish component of his imagery, Rosenberg in fact transcribed "The Female God" almost directly from Jewish legends.6 An examination of...