“Break of Day in the Trenches”
The darkness crumbles away. It is the same old druid Time as ever, Only a live thing leaps my hand, A queer sardonic rat, As I pull the parapet’s poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes At the shrieking iron and flame Hurled through still heavens? What quaver—what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe— Just a little white with the dust.
Isaac Rosenberg, December 1916
Rosenberg’s World War I poem depicts with visceral and arresting imagery the sights and emotions of the ubiquitous trenches crisscrossing the battlefields in Europe. Through his descriptive language he draws sharp contrasts between what is living and what is dead, using words that conjure violent images like “torn,” “bowels,” and comparing roots of poppies to “men’s veins.” He mentions “murder,” and elects a renegade rat to represent the presence of alienated life amongst the deadly ruin which surrounds it. With all this, he aims to convey the horrors and destruction of France’s “torn fields” wrought by the “shrieking iron and flame” of man’s war machines. Despite the break of day and “sleeping green” in the no man’s land betwixt the trenches, Rosenberg conveys the horrific images of war which inspired the subsequent modernist movement and so many of the poems written by his contemporaries.
Interestingly, he alternates quickly between lively and deathly language throughout the poem, the rat being the first “live thing” which “leaps” into the poem, followed later by “torn fields” and “dust.” The juxtaposition is intriguing, as the scene straddles the borderline between death and life just as it temporally is placed between night and morning. The poppies which have cropped up near the narrator in his trench hold a symbolic value, at least to him, enough so that he is concerned with the wellbeing of one tucked behind his ear. While the other flowers - the other shreds of evidence that life had ever existed on this ultimately concerned the impossible presence of persistent life on the battlefield, and the poet’s hopeful quest to preserve and represent it.