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.