Help us keep the lights on Support us
The Bristol Cable

Listen: Bristol WWI poem read by Bristolians today

Podcasts

100 years after ‘The Great War’, we bring to life the voice of Isaac Rosenberg, a soldier poet from Bristol who was killed at the battle of the Somme, 1918.  Passerby’s on Bristol’s streets read the poem ‘Dead Mans Dump’.  Listen to it here:

Dead Man’s Dump

By Isaac Rosenberg

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,
Those 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.

Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

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.

Keep the Lights On

Investigative journalism strengthens democracy – it’s a necessity, not a luxury.

The Cable is Bristol’s independent, investigative newsroom. Owned and steered by more than 2,600 members, we produce award-winning journalism that digs deep into what’s happening in Bristol.

We are on a mission to become sustainable – will you help us get there?

Join now

What makes us different?

Comments

Report a comment. Comments are moderated according to our Comment Policy.

Post a comment

Mark if this comment is from the author of the article

By posting a comment you agree to our Comment Policy.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related content

Racist and traumatising: inside a Section 60 suspicionless stop and search operation

Officers searched innocent children, disproportionately targeted people of colour and undermined their anti-racism reforms during a 48-hour police operation in February. Their narrative that it was an effective knife-crime deterrent, done with consent, is misleading.

Palestine Action proscription: The law has changed, but the truth hasn’t

To proscribe a non-violent direct action group as a terrorist organisation is an affront to freedom of expression. But while we might be appalled by these latest developments, should we be surprised?

Listen: People Just Do Something Live – comrades aren’t cringe, with leftwing US academic Jodi Dean

What's the difference between a party and a movement? Is communism really on the horizon? And how can the UK left get its act together? Professor Jodi Dean has some – but not all – of the answers Isaac and Priyanka crave…

Look Up

Nikesh Shukla introduces his new Cable column, Hope Is Around the Corner, with a tale that begins with a picture of a twat, and an outdated racist slur.

Listen: Bristol Unpacked, with Labour councillor Kirsty Tait on the Just Transition and how best to spend £20m in Hartcliffe

Neil asks Hartcliffe and Withywood representative Kirsty Tait about the government money the neighbourhood is getting – and about the importance of putting working-class voices at the centre of climate conversations.

Callout: Tell us how you feel after last summer’s racist violence in Bristol

It’s been almost a year since the worst racist rioting in generations swept across the UK. Dozens of cities in England and Northern Ireland saw...

Read more

Listen: People Just Do Something – Ethan Shone and the Defence against the Dark Arts

Investigative journalist and Dark Arts newsletter author Ethan Shone takes Isaac and Priyanka on a whistlestop tour of the realm of dark money and secretive political influence.

Join our newsletter

Get the essential stories you won’t find anywhere else

Subscribe to the Cable newsletter to get our weekly round-up direct to your inbox every Saturday

Join our newsletter

Subscribe to the Cable newsletter

Get our latest stories & essential Bristol news
sent to your inbox every Saturday morning