Poems by Isaac Rosenberg by Isaac Rosenberg
III THE TOWER OF SKULLS
Mourners
These layers of piled-up skulls, These layers of gleaming horror—stark horror! Ah me! Through my thin hands they touch my eyes.
Everywhere, everywhere is a pregnant birth, And here in death’s land is a pregnant birth. Your own crying is less mortal Than the amazing soul in your body. Your own crying yon parrot takes up And from your empty skull cries it afterwards.
Thou whose dark activities unenchanted Days from gyrating days, suspending them To thrust them far from sight, from the gyrating days Which have gone widening on and left us here, Cast derelicts lost for ever.
When aged flesh looks down on tender brood; For he knows between his thin ribs’ walls The giant universe, the interminable Panorama—synods, myths and creeds, He knows his dust is fire and seed.
I have heard the Gods In their high conference As I lay outside the world Quiet in sleep.... Fragment.
He was an artist and a dreamer—that is, one whose delight in the beauty of life was an effective obstacle to the achievement of the joy of living.
(Circa 1913.)