Rosenfeld has read the best German and English authors, and although he knows these languages only superficially, he has instinctively guessed the inner meaning contained in their works, and he has transfused the art of his predecessors into his own spirit without imitating them directly. One cannot help, in reading his verses, discovering his obligations to Heine, Schiller, Moore, and Shelley; but it is equally apparent that he owes nothing to them as regards the subject-matter of his poems. He is original not only in Jewish letters but in universal literature as well.
Himself in contact with the lower strata of society and yet in spirit allied to the highest; at once the subject of religious and race persecutions and of industrial oppression; tossed about among the opposition parties or Anarchists, Socialists, Populists, without allying himself with any; by education and associations a Jew, and yet not subscribing strictly to the tenets of the Mosaic Law,—he voices the ominous foreboding of the tidal wave which threatens to submerge our civilization, he utters the cry of anguish and despair that rises in different quarters and condemns the present order of things. Rosenfeld does not scoff, or scorn, or hate. He is one with the oppressor and the oppressed; if he sings more of the latter, it is only because he sees more of that side of life. He is a sensitive plate that reproduces the pictures that arise before his mental vision, and the gloom of his poems is rather that which he sees than that which he feels; for he has also written songs of spring and happiness in the few intervals when the sky has looked down unclouded on the Ghetto in which he has lived so long.
We shall confine ourselves to the small volume of his poetry, 'The Songs from the Ghetto,' even though it contains but one-tenth of all the verses that he has written. Who can read his 'Songs of Labor' without shedding tears? We enter with the poet, who is the tailor himself, the murky sweat-shop where the monotonous click of the sewing-machine, which kills thought and feeling, mysteriously whispers in your ear:—
"Ich arbeit', un' arbeit', un' arbeit' ohn' Cheschben.
Es schafft sich, un' schafft sich, un' schafft sich ohn' Zāhl,"
and we see the workman changed into just such an unfeeling machine. During the short midday hour he has but time to weep and dream of the end of his slavery; when the whistle blows, the boss with his angry look returns, the machine once more ticks, and the tailor again loses his semblance of a human being. What wonder, then, that tears should be the subject of so many of his songs? Even when the laborer returns home he does not find relief from his sorrows; his own child does not see him from one end of the week to the other, for it is asleep when he goes out to work or returns from it ('My Boy'). Not only the workman, but even the mendicant, who has no home and finds his only consolation in his children, has reason to curse the present system when he sees the judge take them away from him to send them to an orphan asylum,—a species of misdirected philanthropy ('The Beggar Family'). Sad are the simple words: 'Ich gēh' vardienen!' uttered by a girl before the break of day, hurrying to the factory, and late at night, following a forced life of vice ('Whither'). Even death does not come to the unfortunate in the calm way of Goethe's 'Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh'; not the birds are silenced, but the worms are waiting for their companion ('Despair'). Nay, after death the laborer arises from his grave to accuse the rich neighbor of having stolen the flowers from his barren mound ('In the Garden of the Dead').
Not less sad are his National Songs. In 'Sephirah' he tells us that the Jew's year is but a succession of periods for weeping. Most of his songs of that class deal with the tragical conflict between religious duties and actualities. Such is 'The First Bath of Ablution,' which is one of the prettiest Jewish ballads. The 'Measuring of the Graves,' which relates the superstition of the Jews who study by candles with the wicks of which graves have been measured, is especially interesting, on account of the excellent use of the language of the Tchines made in it. The unanswered question of the boy in the 'Moon Prayer' is one of many that the poet likes to propound. Perhaps the best poem under the same heading is 'On the Bosom of the Ocean,' which is remarkable not only as a sad portrayal of the misfortunes of the Jew who is driven out of Russia and is sent back from America because he has not the requisite amount of money which would entitle him to stay here, but also on account of the wonderful description of a storm at sea. The same sad strain passes through the poems classed as miscellaneous. Now it is the nightingale that chooses the cemetery in which to sing his sweetest songs ('The Cemetery Nightingale'). Or the flowers in autumn do not call forth regrets, for they have not been smiling on the poor laborer in his suffering ('To the Flowers in Autumn'). Or again, the poet compares himself with the bird who sings in the wilderness where 'the dead remain dead, and the silent remain silent' ('In the Wilderness').
The gloom that lies over so many of Rosenfeld's poems is the result of his own sad experiences in the sweat-shop and during his struggle for existence; but this gloom is only the accident of his themes. Behind it lies the inexhaustible field of the poet's genius which adorns and beautifies every subject on which he chooses to write. The most remarkable characteristic of his genius is to weld into one the dramatic action and the lyrical qualities of his verse, as has probably never been attempted before. Whether he writes of the sweat-shop, or of the storm on the ocean, or of the Jewish soldier who rises nightly from his grave, we in every instance get a drama and yet a lyric, not as separate developments, but inextricably combined into one whole. Thus, for example, 'In the Sweat-shop' is a lyrical poem, if Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' is one, but in so far as the poet, or operative, is turned into a machine and is subjected to the exterior forces which determine his moods and his destiny, we have the evolution of a tragedy before us. Similarly, the exact parallel of the storm on the ocean with the storm in the hearts of the two Jews in the steerage is no less of a dramatic nature than an utterance of subjective feelings.
Rosenfeld does not confine himself to pointing out the harmony which subsists between man and the elements that control his moods and actions; he carries this parallelism into the minutest details of the more technical structure of his poems: the amphibrachic measure in the 'Sweat-shop' is that of the ticking machine, which in the two lines given above reaches the highest effect that can be produced by mere words. In the 'Nightingale to the Laborer,' the intricate versification with its sonnet rhymes, the repetition of the first line in each stanza with its returning repetition in the tenth line, the slight variations of the same burden in each succeeding stanza which saves it from monotony, are all artifices that the poet has learned from the bird along his native lake in Poland. These two examples will suffice to indicate the astonishing versatility of the poet in that direction; add to this the wealth of epithets, and yet extreme simplicity of diction which never strives for effect, the musicalness of his rhythm, the chasteness of expression even where the cynical situations seem to make it difficult to withstand imprecations and curses, and we can conceive to what marvellous perfection this untutored poet of the Ghetto has carried his dialect in which Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and English words are jostling each other and contending their places with those from the German language.
It was left for a Russian Jew at the end of the nineteenth century to see and paint hell in colors not attempted by any one since the days of Dante; Dante spoke of the hell in the after-life, while Rosenfeld sings of the hell on earth, the hell that he has not only visited, but that he has lived through. Another twenty-five years, and the language in which he has uttered his despair will be understood in America but by few, used for literary purposes probably by none. But Rosenfeld's poetry will survive as a witness of that lowermost hell which political persecutions, religious and racial hatred, industrial oppression have created for the Jew at the end of this our enlightened nineteenth century.