Phil Klay is always named among the best of contemporary American writers — especially about war and soldiers. After serving in the Marine Corps in Iraq, he would win the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 with his collection of short stories, “Redeployment,” followed by his 2020 novel, “Missionaries,” and his 2022 collection of essays, “Uncertain Ground.” The New York Sun is proud to run his selection of five war poems for this week that ends with Veterans Day (Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, in other English-speaking countries) on Friday, November 11.

For the first day of a week of war poetry in the Sun, guest editor Phil Klay writes: 

“God” by Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) is perhaps an odd poem to pick, if we’re looking for poems about soldiers and soldiering. Rosenberg, the poor child of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Great Britain, served as an enlisted British soldier in World War I. Killed after a night patrol on April 1, 1918 in a town called Fampoux and buried in a mass grave, he wrote some of the most evocative poetry directly addressing the war itself — from the devastating “Dead Man’s Dump” to the painterly “Marching” and his masterful “Break of Day in the Trenches,” which Paul Fussell considered the greatest poem of the war.

“God” was written after he’d joined the army but before he’d seen action. It was published with “Moses,” a one-act drama that the critic Jean Moorcroft Wilson called “his most sustained attempt to express his dread of what the war might do to him and his aspirations.”

But “God” is the Rosenberg I think of most often, with its horrific image of a deity whose “body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.” There is a visceral, spiritual horror to this poem, a revolt against God alongside the sickness caused by stench of God’s decay. And we can well imagine with what dread a new soldier — awkward, speaking with a stutter, with weak lungs, so short he was put in the Bantams (for men between five foot and five foot three) — imagined personally on the horizon when he penned the lines:
 
“Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.”
 
In the Autumn of 1916, Rosenberg wrote, “I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting. . . . I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.”

By 1918, he admitted, “Sometimes I give way and am appalled at the devastation this life seems to have made in my nature.” Rosenberg’s “God” offers a image of devastation that extends beyond the physical and psychological, and it is the way all his poems stretch beyond humanist revolt against horror and into a spiritual dimension that stays with me.

God
by Isaac Rosenberg

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
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.

Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.

But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us, but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it.
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through,
Where blind farewells are taken easily . . .

Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.