Isaac Rosenberg: 'Through these pale cold days'

As a new feature for the blog, I am going to publish a war poem each week. Copyright rules out much of the twentieth century, so my focus will tend to be the Great War and earlier. This week, Isaac Rosenberg's 'Through these pale cold days', followed by some brief notes. Do please post below any comments about the poem or my interpretation.




Through these pale cold days

Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years,
And their wild eyes yearn,

While underneath their brows
Like waifs their spirits grope
For the pools of Hebron again---
For Lebanon's summer slope.

They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead.

This was the last poem Rosenberg wrote. He sent it to Edward Marsh in a letter dated 28 March 1918, calling it 'a slight thing' and commenting that 'My vocabulary small enough before is impoverished and bare'. By the time the letter arrived in England, Rosenberg was dead. He had been killed while on night patrol on 1 April.

'Through these pale cold days' has always seemed to me to be among the greatest and most mysterious of Rosenberg's poems, notwithstanding his own reservations. It is rarely anthologised, perhaps because editors remain unpersuaded that it should even be classified as war poetry. Yet its long view of Jewish history pressing into the present, and the departure of these strange revenants in the final stanza, are powerful if idiosyncratic responses to current circumstances. 'Revenants' only in one sense, because these long-dead ancestors find their descendants among inhospitable terrain --- not the familiar pools of Hebron nor Lebanon's summer slope, but the 'blond still days' which are so hostile to Jewishness: in 'The Jew', written the previous summer, Rosenberg had complained that 'the blonde', 'the bronze' and 'the ruddy' all 'sneer at me'.

Geoffrey Hill in Speech! Speech! has written of Rosenberg that 'His last efforts / to survive---like THROUGH THESE PALE COLD DAYS--- / appear belated and timely acts / of atonement'. There is a typically Hillian paradox in 'belated and timely', and Hill's preoccupation with ideas of atonement risks turning Rosenberg into Hill avant la lettre. All the same, the similarities between Rosenberg and Hill provide reminders of a debt which Hill is always prepared to acknowledge. Rosenberg, in those pale cold days, is briefly at one with his ghosts; he sees with living eyes for them; they are dead and, through him, alive. However, their visit is necessarily short; with new understanding of the future, they turn away to resume their search for the lost Edenic home. The poet is left behind, abandoned even by his own people.