Isaac Rosenberg Poems

Girl To A Soldier On Leave
Love! You love me — your eyes
Have looked through death at mine.
You have tempted a grave too much
...

What if you shut your eyes and look,
Yea, look with all the spirit's eyes,
While mystic unrevealed skies
Unfold like pages of a book
...

A little breath can make a prayer,
A little wind can take it
And turn it back again to air:
Then say, why should you make it ?
...

As a sword in the sun
A glory calling a glory
Our eyes, seeing it run,
Capture its gleam for our story.
...

She stood-a hill-ensceptred Queen,
The glory streaming from her ;
While Heaven flashed her rays between,
And shed eternal summer.
...

IN THE WORKSHOP

Dim watery lights gleaming on gibbering faces,
Faces speechful, barren of soul and sordid,
Huddled and chewing a jest, lewd and gabbled
insidious:
Laughter, born of its dung, flashes and floods like sunlight,
...

' Here are houses,' he moaned,
'I could reach, but my brain swims.'
Then they thundered and flashed,
And shook the earth to its rims.
...

Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs,
Their naked dances with man's spirit naked
By the root side of the tree of life
The under side of things
...

Slow, rigid, is this masquerade
That passes as through a difficult air :
Heavily-heavily passes.
What has she fed on ? Who her table laid
...

My days are but the tombs of buried hours ;
Which tombs are hidden in the piled years ;
But from the mounds there spring up many flowers,
Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears.
...