Whate’er he sing, however he may laugh
However gay he seeks to make the strain,
There suddenly awakens in his song
The suppliant’s psalm that rends the heart with pain.
Me thinks I fain would call upon my lyre
To laugh a little, but in vain the call!
For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now,
Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all?
For the Rosenfeld of the Songs from the Ghetto, the present is terrible and the future hopeless; there is always an aching desire for beauty and happiness, but to him beauty and happiness themselves wait upon toil and suffering and death—the nightingale groans “upon the great cemetery of the world.”
But Songs from the Ghetto was written some fifteen years ago. Some of his later poetry is lighter—some hope and the joy of living appear to have crept into it. Of these, a hitherto unpublished poem in English called “If,” has but a gentle melancholy: