"Break of Day in the Trenches" by Isaac Rosenberg (poetry reading)

This poem is frequently set as coursework for students.

You could mention that he greatly admired William Blake and, like Blake, he was both a painter and a poet. Also that he saw a significance in nature reflected in the hearts of men, the rat being is as symbolic as Blake's tiger and his lamb.

Without knowing this, it would be hard to guess that this poem was about the outbreak of war:

Snow is a strange white word;
No ice or frost
Have asked of bud or bird
For Winters cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know,
No man knows why.

In all mens hearts it is.
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Here's an excellent biographical article about him:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/rosenberg/

You could contrast his views with those of John Ruskin, who coined the term "The Pathetic Fallacy", to describe the common conceit in the tendency,:

"to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy

The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched the English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.

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[thallassocracy]

'Cosmopolitan' was used as a term of racial abuse by GK Chesterton - to mean 'Jewish'.

I've often wondered if that was a general euphemism at the time - or a Chesterton special.

It makes a difference to the way I read this poem.

[SpokenVerse]

Characters in Dickens who described themselves as 'Cosmopolitan' were given to displays of charity and humanitarianism while neglecting their family and personal relationships. In time of war the term was not the compliment it seemed to be because it implied doubt about patriotism.