Isaac Rosenberg Poems

The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
...

The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
...

Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lies there.
...

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

What in our lives is burnt
In the fire of this?
The heart’s dear granary?
The much we shall miss?
...

Nudes -- stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
...

I snatched two poppies
From the parapet’s ledge,
Two bright red poppies
That winked on the ledge.
...

I killed them, but they would not die.
Yea! all the day and all the night
For them I could not rest or sleep,
Nor guard from them nor hide in flight.
...

Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
Lit by a lamp in his blood
Ten immutable rules, a moon
For mutable lampless men.
...

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
...