POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG
I should think you are right mostly, and I may yet work away your chief objections. You are quite right in the way you read my poems, but I thought I could use the 'July Ghost' to mean the summer, and also an ambassador of the summer, without interfering with the sense. The 'shell of thought' is man; you realize a shell has an opening, the 'ardours'; the sense of heat forms a web; this signifies a sense of summer; the web again becomes another metaphor, a July Ghost. But, of course, I mean it for summer right through. I think your suggestion of taking out 'woven' is very good."
The next letter is from Cape Town.
To Edward Marsh (1914).
"I should like you to do me a favour if it's not putting you to too much bother. I am in an infernal city by the sea. This city has men in it—and these men have souls in them—or at least have the passages to souls. Though they are millions of years behind time, they have yet reached the stage of evolution that knows ears and eyes. But these passages are dreadfully clogged up: gold dust, diamond dust, stocks and shares, and Heaven knows what other flinty muck. Well, I've made up
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