Poems by Isaac Rosenberg

INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR
I
Of the many young poets who gave their lives
in
the war, Isaac Rosenberg was not the least gifted.
Adverse circumstances, imperfect education, want
of opportunity, impeded and obscured his genius ;
but whatever criticism be made of his poetry, its
faults are plainly those of excess rather than
deficiency. His writing was often difficult and
obscure, because he instinctively thought in images
and did not sufficiently appreciate the limitations
of language.
Also, a continual fear of being empty
or thin led him to an over- intricate complexity.
But there was no incoherence in his mind. And
the main object of these notes, beyond recording
the facts of his life, is to illustrate the growth and
workings of his mind from his own letters, which
will be the best commentary on his poems.
I cannot precisely fix the date, but it must have
been some time in 1912, when one morning there
came to me a letter in an untidy hand from an
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