Pollyanna in the Cold Face of Death: “Returning, We Hear the Larks”

One of the well-known English poets of the First World War Period, Isaac Rosenberg is famous for his work Poems from the Trenches. Even the name of his work is telling us that Rosenberg’s poems are about the soldiers’ conditions and psychological state of mind in the hell-like trenches. Rosenberg himself was one of them and he died while in action in a terrible trench. One of his greatest poems, “Returning, We Hear the Larks” is somehow shuttling between the inclination of human nature towards joy, even for a minute stolen from the falling bombs and fearful atmosphere of the trenches, and the fact that  human mind is always returning back to the idea of survival when it is under danger.

The very first line of the poem states that night is sombre. Soldiers were sleeping in the trenches when the night inevitably came. A trench was both a fighting area and a bed of a soldier. The dreadful ambience of those hell-like tunnels always stayed the same for them, even when they had time to rest. The repeated phrase “we know” in the poem shows that soldiers were fed up with hearing the possible dangers of being at a war. They knew it and now that they survived another day, they did not have to to hear it anymore in the precious time for “a little safe sleep.”

In the third stanza, Rosenberg invites his inner self to listen to the passing larks, which shows that he can still feel the joy of the ongoing mechanism of the universe. It is indeed a “strange joy” to hear such a natural and naive sound in the cruel atmosphere of the war. Imagine that those soldiers were seeing their friends bleeding and bombs streaming up in the air in the day time, and now there is the sound of the lovely birds. This sharp fluctuation in the atmosphere causes Rosenberg to shift his mood to a more hopeful one. Although it is a very short relief from the hell-like atmosphere, it takes the poet into a land of natural beauty full of joyful melodies.

In the last lines of the poem, Rosenberg tries to negotiate the joy he feels and the need for the survival of a human being. “Death could drop from the dark” he says, reminding the reader the possibility of a viperous German attack in the night, yet there luckily came the song of the birds this time. The joy he finds in nature does not last long because he is a soldier who has responsibilities for both his own life and country. Consequently, the poet interprets the joy he feels as being “like a blind man’s dreams on the sand.” The soldiers cannot see the bombs as the blind man cannot see the sea and its “dangerous tides.” It is the bitter reality of war that soldiers were destitute to oblivion of the terrifying atmosphere, and yet it was impossible. It could not be real, such a dream that a beautiful girl dreams. Rosenberg’s poem reveals that his mind is moving between a short moment of relaxation he finds in nature and the bitter fact that he can die anytime. In the end, he sticks with the reality and resign himself to the requirements of being a soldier in a deadly trench. 
The poem is splendid in showing that hope is indispensable and even a soldier in a hell-like trench can find it in the little waves of nature and its small components.