Isaac Rosenberg-Dead Man's Dump

A Dead Man's Dump is the most descriptive poem about War during World War I.  The visual effects of the poem appear are vivid and horrific. Rosenberg is looking at the "dumps" of dead bodies that are strewn around him. The sound of war and death are around him along with the lost souls of his peers. The imagery used in the poem presents the picture of what modern artists wanted people to see. The truth, the treachery, abandoning the ideas of a Romantic or Victorian era. The poem's imagery propels the reader into an abyss of hell. "The wheels lurched over sprawled dead/But pained them not, though their bones crunched"(Lines 7-8). One can see and feel the vivid image of the dead men being trampled. "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"(Lines 10-13). Rosenberg examines the lives he sees before him. Looking at their life of not just men, but being of importance, but to someone. However, all of them lying there dead bear no difference "friend and foeman". The shells could possible be the screams of men or even the the artillery being used. The noise and horror is constant-"From night till night".  The images get more horrific as the poem continues; "The air is loud with death/The Dark air spurts with fire/The explosion ceaseless are." (Lines 39-41). The reader gets not only the sense of battlefield, but a picture of vision of hell."A man's brains splattered on/A stretcher-bearer's face;..../The drowning soul was sunk too deep/For human tenderness" (Lines 55-60).  The dying process continues in these lines. The reader can also feel that no one can be saved. The man (drowning in his own blood) cannot be reached-"too deep/For human tenderness".  The poem ends with a Rosenberg seeing a soldier who appears to be on the verge of death, however, they hear his screams and do not stop; "We heard his weak scream,/We heard his very last sound,/And our wheels grazed his dead face" (Lines 84-86). Rosenberg paints the horror of war by taking the reader into the battlefield. What makes this poem unique is its vividness in the process dying. It is not filled with valor or beauty. Rather the ugly face of death appears. Relatively, the consequence of war.
The most intriguing part about this poem is the fact that it comes from a different culture residing in Britain and fighting a war that he possibly did not feel akin. War and death have no distinct cultural definition. People die in wars. this poem relates that everyone dies in a war. Even the living suffer.