"Moses"
Although Rosenberg joined a great many other young British poets who served for England during World War I, he was one of the few of the who presented a Jewish perspective. Rosenberg published a long and complex work of dramatic verse on the Moses the lawgivers as part of his fascination with ancient Jewish history.
Lilith
Lilith is another important figure from the ancient Hebrew past, though more mythic than celebrated. She is usually situated as the first woman, preceding Eve but jettisoned from the story for various feminist empowerment reasons. Oddly, however, Rosenberg engages the Lilith myth in an assortment of works that transform her legendary status. In a dramatic play written in verse, Lilith is the wife of Saul rather than Adam.
“Tess”
In addition to a fascination with mythic Hebrew figures, Rosenberg also possessed a strong attraction to a more contemporary figure: writer Thomas Hardy. Although the connection is never addressed directly in the verse itself, it is widely know that his poem title “Tess” was inspired and written about Hardy’s famous character of the D’Urbervilles.
Soldiers
Rosenberg is most famous, of course, as one of the many poets who went to war and never came back. His poems are shot through with images of war as seen from the inside and with the perspective of the all-seeing poet’s eye. “Louse Hunting” is a poem about exactly what it says and it is the kind of detail of life during wartime not usually found in the literature of glorification of battle. The title figure of another poem, “The Dying Soldier” is both a literal individual thirsting for water and a broader symbol of all young men who die in faraway battlefield. The list of poems about unnamed soldiers commonly united by their universal quality rather than distinct individualism makes up the bulk of Rosenberg's most highly regarded body of verse.
