From Pandemonium

Elizabeth Cook

• The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg edited by Vivien Noakes
  Oxford, 427 pp, £90.00, August 2004, ISBN 0 19 818715 7

In June 1914, the 24-year-old Isaac Rosenberg left his home in Stepney, East London, to stay with his married sister Minnie Horvitch in Cape Town in the hope that the climate might improve his health. He was in Cape Town when he heard that war had been declared. He responded in ‘On Receiving News of the War: Cape Town’:

Snow is a strange white word.
No ice or frost
Have asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know.
No man knows why.

In all men’s hearts it is.
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face.
God’s blood is shed.
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.
O! ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume.
Give back this universe Its pristine bloom.