MORRIS ROSENFELD
From an etching by Herman Struck
His poems are cries of pain out of his own life interpreted in terms of the life of his class. He is always lyric, he is always personal, but he is never egotistical. The story runs that at his machine in the midday hour he would write a lyric of the workshop instead of eating his meager lunch. The song to the working-girl prostitute is one of these workshop poems which like a flash reveal working and living conditions such as in less revealing form have been put before us by investigators.
The twelve-hour day may be said to be the subject of My Boy. The tailor’s baby was always asleep when his father got home from work:
MY BOY
I have a little boy, a fine little fellow is he! When I see him it appears to me the whole world is mine.
Only rarely, rarely I see him, my pretty little son, when he is awake; I find him always asleep, I see him only at night.
My work drives me out early and brings me home late; oh, my own flesh is a stranger to me; oh, strange to me the glances of my child!
I come home in anguish and shrouded in darkness—my pale wife tells how nicely the child plays.
I stand by the cradle.