This draft of Break of Day In the Trenches was typed and set by Annie Rosenberg, possibly in June, while Isaac Rosenberg created the written annotations, likely in July.
Rosenberg’s earlier poetry betrays his Romantic influences. In “Break of Day…
As a private on the front lines of the Western Front, Rosenberg was injured before he was reassigned to a works battalion. This experience is reflected in his poem “Dead Man’s Dump,” which is written from the point of view of a soldier going out on a…
In his poem "Repression of War Experience," Siegfried Sassoon uses a metaphor of moths, who "blunder in," only to "scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame," like soldiers who believed that they would prove themselves heroes through war. Like…
Wilfred Owen’s poem portrays two speakers meeting in “some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped / Through granites which titanic wars had groined” (2-3). This granite tunnel is the aftermath of titanic wars, an image which reflects afterlife as…
In April 1917, Sassoon’s company with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers supported a French assault on the supposedly secure German defenses, known as the Hindenburg Line. His 1917 poem “The Rear-Guard (Hindenburg Line, April, 1917)” is based upon this…
Published in Current Opinion in 1917, Mary Borden wrote of her experiences as a woman at war in her poem "The Song of the Mud." Throughout the poem, Borden enumerates the various qualities of mud, an environmental threat on the battlefield of war,…
The Hydra was launched in April 1917 and stopped publication in 1918, serving as a hospital magazine for the soldiers at Craiglockhart Hospital. Wilfred Owen served as one of its editors, while Siegfried Sassoon's poems "Break of Day" and "Base…