| Break of Day in the Trenches | |
| The darkness crumbles away. | |
| It is the same old druid Time as ever, | |
| Only a live thing leaps my hand, | |
| A queer sardonic rat | |
| As I pull the parapet’s poppy | 5 |
| To stick behind my ear. | |
| Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew | |
| Your cosmopolitan sympathies. | |
| Now you have touched this English hand | |
| You will do the same to a German | 10 |
| Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure | |
| To cross the sleeping green between. | |
| It seems you inwardly grin as you pass | |
| Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, | |
| Less chanced than you for life, | 15 |
| Bonds to the whims of murder, | |
| Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, | |
| The torn fields of France. | |
| What do you see in our eyes | |
| At the shrieking iron and flame | |
| Hurled through still heavens? | |
| What quaver — what heart aghast? | |
| Poppies whose roots are in man's veins | |
| Drop, and are ever dropping; | |
| But mine in my ear is safe — | |
| Just a little white with the dust. | |
Break of Day in the Trenches — Rosenberg wrote this poem in June 1916, after he had already been at the front for about nine months. Paul Fussell, the literary critic whose 1975 book The Great War and Modern Memory was the seminal study of the World War I poets, called this poem the single greatest one of the war. |
|
| druid — Druids were the privileged class of the ancient Celtic people of England, and included priests, healers, poets, and experts in the law. They are also often associated with Stonehenge in the popular imagination (and Rosenberg would have thought of them that way), though archaeologists now believe Stonehenge as an important site may go back as far as 4,000 B.C.E., long before the Druids. | |
| cosmopolitan — sophisticated, well-travelled, not provincial or nationalistic | |
| Poppies whose roots are in men’s veins — literally true, because poppies grew over soldiers’ graves all over the western front. | |