You can now compare your edition with the published one that appears in Vivien Noakes's (ed.) The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg (OUP, 2004), pp. 139-142 (with notes pp. 367-9). Noakes observes that 'No complete MS has been traced' and she elects to choose the typescript MSF (correctly IR/I/263-4) as her base. Clearly she views this as the latest typescript (the fourth one).

DEAD MAN'S DUMP

The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan,
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended - stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit
Earth! have they gone into you?
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul's sack,
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us, who flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire
The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,
These dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called 'an end!'
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break,
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight,
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.

Seminar Conclusion

In the course of this tutorial the manuscripts and typescripts have been referred to as A, B, C, etc. In reality they are as follows (MSS A-F are held in the Imperial War Museum, London):

A IR/I/256 – 'Pencil draft, numbered '2' by Isaac Rosenberg. Contains 4 unused lines, 20-25, one unused line, 26-29. The corrections in red crayon and pencil are by Gordon Bottomley. B IR/255a and 255b – 'Pencil draft with one pencil alteration of incomplete poem entitled 'The Young Dead', later incorporated into 'Dead Man's Dump' as lines 14-19, followed by four unused lines, then lines 20-24, remainder unused. Paper torn prior to use by Isaac Rosenberg. C IR/I/257 – 'Second page of typed manuscript on pink paper corrected in ink by Isaac Rosenberg. Contains lines 48-79. Possible word mistakes may be the result of dictation to a typist; Isaac Rosenberg has corrected these in ink. D IR/I/259 – 'Second Typescript on pink paper with corrections by Isaac Rosenberg in ink. 'from Mrs. Cohen' written in ink in the top right corner. First page contains title, lines 1-19, four unused lines, 20-25, one unused line, 26-38. Possible word mistakes may be the result of dictation to a typist. E IR/I/261 – 'Third Typescript of two pages on pink paper corrected in ink with pencil alternatives. Title in pencil. Page one contains lines 1-19, 4 lines crossed through in pencil, 20-24, two unused lines cancelled in pencil with the alternative 'Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.' written in the margin, 26-47. F IR/I/263 – 'Fourth Typescript on pink paper, title in pencil with pencil alterations, with some questions as to punctuation changes in lines 20 and 21. The pages are numbered in ink by Annie Rosenberg. In the four cancelled lines 'grain' has been corrected to 'green' by Isaac Rosenberg.' This is the base text that Vivien Noakes uses for her edition. G IRNYPLBERG1223u – 'Copy of May 1917 version of poem in unknown hand. No complete manuscript version of the poem exists.' This is held in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. H British Library (BL) Rosenberg letters I512E 20/6/1917 – 'Typescript of poem with correction in pen. Included with letter to Gordon Bottomley dated 20th June 1917 describing pleasure at having received a letter from Gordon Bottomley praising the poem 'Daughters of War'. I BL Rosenberg letters I512E 20/6/1917 'Pencil alterations from line 26 written on lined scrap paper in Isaac Rosenberg's hand. Included with letter to Gordon Bottomley noted above (MS H). MS Marsh Letter to Edward Marsh discussing the poem, dated 3rd June 1917.

Author: Dr. Stuart Lee, 2009