Months fly, and years pass away, and the pale faced one still bends over his work and struggles with the unfeeling machine. I stand and look at his face; his face is besmutted and covered with sweat. I feel that it is not bodily strength that works in him but the incitement of the spirit. And the tears fall in succession from day break until fall of night and water the clothes and enter into the seams. Pray how long will the weak one drive the bloody wheel? Who can tell his end? Who knows the terrible secret? Hard, very hard to answer that! But one thing is certain: when the work will have killed him another will be sitting in his place and sewing. A desire for life—if it is a feast, he would sit at it; if it is a dream he would have it a beautiful one—a love of the outdoor country life which he knew as a boy and which he believed all should enjoy, mingled with a sense of impotence and despair, varying with outbursts of wailing and outbursts of hate, these things characterize the poetry of Morris Rosenfeld. For all his power to vizualize and voice the world about him, he is never constructive, never militant, and seldom even virile.[6] In few poems does he express any hope for the future. In a mood of despair he writes the beautiful workshop poem: A TEAR ON THE IRON I groan and cough and press, and think My eye grows damp, a tear falls; the iron is hot, My little tear it seethes and seethes and will not dry up. I feel no strength, it is all used up; the iron falls from my hand, and yet the tear, the silent tear, the tear, the tear boils more and more. My head whirls, my heart breaks. I ask in woe: “Oh, tell me, my friend in adversity and pain, O tear, why not dry up in seething.” “Are you perhaps a messenger and announce that other tears are coming? I should like to know it; say, when will the great woe be ended?” I should have asked more of the turbulent tear; but suddenly there began to flow more tears, tears without measure, and I at once understood that the river of tears is very deep. In a mood of mingled longing and hate, he writes the Flowers of Autumn, whose splendor is only for the well-to-do— Therefore I do not care if I see you dying now. There is more virility, though nothing really purposeful in the Garden of the Dead, where the dead worker rises up to claim the flowers on the rich man’s grave: Not only the flowers are mine, nay, even the boards of the coffin are mine! And not only the boards of the coffin—you shrouds, you, too, are mine! He has it all through my work, my poor work—oh, all and all is mine!