The Essay - Isaac Rosenberg's Dead Man's Dump
Download Isaac Rosenberg's Dead Man's Dump
Five writers explore the year 1917 through the works of five Great War artists. Tonight, Santanu Das explores the poetic world of Bristol-born Isaac Rosenberg.
Less familiar today than his contemporaries Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Rosenberg described - as they did - the horror of war close-up: "The wheels lurched over sprawled dead / But pained them not, though their bones crunched, / Their shut mouths made no moan..." wrote Rosenberg in his great poem of 100 years ago, Dead Man's Dump. "Earth has waited for them, / All the time of their growth / Fretting for their decay: / Now she has them at last!"
In tonight's Essay, Santanu Das re-reads Rosenberg's 1917 poem, written a few months before his own death having just completed a night patrol - on April 1st 1918.
Producer: Simon Elmes.
Published on Friday, 23rd June 2017.
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