How to observe Memorial Day?
When in doubt, let the poets speak.
Isaac Rosenberg, a British painter and a poet, told friends he didn’t sign up for the Great War for patriotic reasons. He thought everyone enlisted for the same reason: The country was in trouble, and people wanted to get it over.
Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” begins with these lines:
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
To stick behind my ear.
The poet says the rat seems to like his chances for living better than those of the soldiers.
Rosenberg was killed April 1, 1918.
• Isaac Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches”; Poetry Magazine, December 1916. It’s available here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13535/break-of-day-in-the-trenches
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