Poem of the week: ​April Fools’ Day by Elaine Feinstein

A biographical sketch of a misfit soul carried into the carnage of the first world war rises to an elegy for a ‘life half lived’

April Fools’ Day
in memory of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Does anybody know what it was all for?
Not Private Rosenberg, short as John Keats.
A nudge from Ezra Pound took him to war,
to sleep on boards, in France, with rotting feet,
writing his poetry by candle ends.
His fellow soldiers always found him odd.
Outsiders do not easily make friends
if they are awkward – with a foreign God.

He should have stayed in Cape Town with his sister.
Did he miss Marsh’s breakfasts at Gray’s Inn,
or Café Royal? He longed for the centre
though he was always shy with Oxbridge toffs –
He lacked the sexy eyes of Mark Gertler –
and his Litvak underlip could put them off.
‘From Stepney East!’ as Pound wrote
Harriet Monroe, while sending poems to her.

He died on April Fools’ Day on patrol,
beyond the corpses lying in the mud,
carrying up the line a barbed wire roll
—useless against gunfire—with the blood
and flesh of Death in the spring air.
His was the life half lived, if even that,
and the remains of it were never found. We remember
the iron honey gold, his cosmopolitan rat.

Elaine Feinstein’s latest collection, Portraits, includes biographical tributes to a range of literary and artistic figures. Not all are poets: there are singers and musicians (Edith Piaf, Louis Armstrong), and even a politician – Benjamin Disraeli. Portraits is a retrospective exhibition, the summary of a long and varied writing life, narrated through the stories of the friends and inspiring figures who have accompanied it.

These figures, however admired, are not idealised, and neither is Isaac Rosenberg, the subject of April Fools’ Day. His treatment verges on the brusque. Yet he is one of the subjects to whom Elaine Feinstein seems to feel closest.

Rosenberg died in the Great War, on 1 April 1918, at the Battle of Arras. Not only a commemoration of his death, the title may imply that the war itself was one long April Fools’ Day, an implication strengthened by the question of the first line. “Does anybody know what it was all for?” the speaker asks. “Not Isaac Rosnberg … ” Right away, he’s the baffled anti-hero personified.

The poem runs swiftly through the basic facts. Feinstein has not published a biography of Rosenberg, as far as I know, but she draws on her biographer’s skill for condensing the details and shaping the bigger picture. The narrative is loosely tethered by an ABABCDCD rhyme-scheme, reversing linear chronology in the first two stanzas, so we begin with the war. The oddness of Rosenberg’s behaviour and looks is established early and forms a recurring motif. We’re left in no doubt that the young artist was unattractive, socially inept – and short.

Rosenberg was “short as John Keats” – a fact which had led to his relegation to a bantam regiment, where the slight stature of the conscripts reflected poverty and malnutrition. The “nudge from Ezra Pound”, whatever it was, may not have been the only pressure that sent Rosenberg to war: family poverty was a consideration. Disclosure of his background (his family were Jewish Lithuanian émigrés) is postponed until the Pound quotation (“Stepney East!”) in the next stanza. “Private Rosenberg” reminds us the poet was not officer-class, and scribbled his last poems in the cesspit of the trenches. “Rotting feet” and “candle ends” sum it up. The last line alludes obliquely to antisemitism. Perhaps, too, the “Foreign God” represents poetry.

The next, more loosely rhymed stanza, returns the young conscript to happier times. But, again, a wrong direction is taken – the decision to leave Cape Town. The abrupt movement of the verse, casual diction and underplayed rhymes add to the sensation of a life crowded with event. Rosenberg had attracted the interest of Edward Marsh and Ezra Pound: he was a gifted painter, too, and had embarked on a not unexciting career. The poem establishes that Rosenberg was never quite the master of his fate. Even before life in the trenches, there was little room for examining options, taking the longer perspective, making choices. He belonged, after all, to the un-leisured class.

In stanza three, the scepticism of the opening question re-emerges in the remark about barbed wire being “useless against gunfire”. The reference to “the blood/ and flesh of Death in the spring air” is a sudden, sharp lift-off to a rhetorical level which the poem has otherwise strenuously denied itself. Despite the matter-of-fact reference to the life half lived, imagery from Rosenberg’s poems, particularly August, 1914, shifts the register from biographical to elegiac. “Three lives hath one life-/ Iron, honey, gold. /The gold, the honey gone –/Left is the hard and cold.” The three symbolic elements from Rosenberg’s quatrain, fused together without punctuation, are transmuted into the more-than-biographical substance, the life of poetry.

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