He very deliberately chose not to bury his head in the local sand and, as a consequence, faced the choices and moral challenges of his time with solitude, honesty and rare courage. This integrity, and its ultimately gratifying effects upon his poetry, should command the renewed interest and respect of Irish people at the present time […].
SEAMUS HEANEY: Introduction to Francis Ledwidge – Selected Poems (New Island Books, 1992)
Ledwidge was born of humble Irish stock in Slane, Co. Meath, and raised in a cottage that now serves as a museum to his life and work. His father, an evicted tenant-farmer, died when he was four, and his mother worked tirelessly in the fields and cleaned houses to support her family. Frank was sent by her to work as a grocer’s apprentice in Rathfarnham, where he wrote his first poem, ‘Behind the closed eye’, an expression of his longing for home. Ledwidge was fortunate to have in Lord Dunsany a patron of perception and influence who introduced him to the Dublin Literary Circle and wrote introductions to his three volumes of verse: Songs of the Fields (1916), Songs of the Peace (1917) and Last Songs (1918). Edward Marsh also published him in his Georgian Poetry volumes. Much of Ledwidge’s verse deals with the countryside and his love for Ellie Vaughey (‘To one dead’), the daughter of a landowner who eventually married a man of her own social station. The conflict that Ledwidge, the Irish nationalist, experienced in joining the British Army to fight in France during the First World War, instead of joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood, is reflected in several of his poems. As he himself put it: ‘I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilization and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions.’ Another reason for joining up was possibly the opportunity it gave him of banishing Ellie from his mind. It was in a military hospital that the wounded poet heard the news of the Easter Uprising and the subsequent executions – events which gave rise to his best-known poem about the Dublin rising’s fallen leader, the poet Thomas McDonagh:
He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.
Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill,
Blowing to flame the golden cup
Of many an upset daffodil.
But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor,
And pastures poor with greedy weeds,
Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.
‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,’ Auden wrote of Yeats (‘In memory of W. B. Yeats’), and the same might be said of Ledwidge in several of his best poems. Having survived Gallipoli and the blizzards of Serbia, he was killed in action in Belgium at the age of twenty-nine. His distinctive poetry, though narrow in range, has experienced something of a revival since Seamus Heaney wrote his fine elegy ‘In memoriam Francis Ledwidge’.
I love the cradle songs the mothers sing
In lonely places when the twilight drops,
The slow, endearing melodies that bring
Sleep to the weeping lids; and, when she stops,
I love the roadside birds upon the tops
Of dusty hedges in a world of Spring.
And when the sunny rain drips from the edge
Of midday wind, and meadows lean one way,
And a long whisper passes through the sedge,
Beside the broken water let me stay,
While these old airs upon my memory play,
And silent changes colour up the hedge.
Thro’ the faintest filigree
Over the dim waters go
Little ships of Arcady
When the morning moon is low.
I can hear the sailors’ song
From the blue edge of the sea,
Passing like the lights along
Thro’ the dusky filigree.
Then where moon and waters meet
Sail by sail they pass away,
With little friendly winds replete
Blowing from the breaking day.
And when the little ships have flown,
Dreaming still of Arcady
I look across the waves, alone
In the misty filigree.
A blackbird singing
On a moss upholstered stone,
Bluebells swinging,
Shadows wildly blown,
A song in the wood,
A ship on the sea,
The song was for you
And the ship was for me.
A blackbird singing
I hear in my troubled mind,
Bluebells swinging
I see in a distant wind.
But sorrow and silence
Are the wood’s threnody,
The silence for you
And the sorrow for me.
Nothing but sweet music wakes
My Beloved, my Beloved.
Sleeping by the blue lakes,
My own Beloved!
Song of the lark and song of the thrush,
My Beloved! my Beloved!
Sing in morning’s rosy bush,
My own Beloved!
When your eyes dawn blue and clear,
My Beloved! my Beloved!
You will find me waiting here,
My own Beloved!
The rim of the moon
Is over the corn.
The beetle’s drone
Is above the thorn.
Grey days come soon
And I am alone;
Can you hear my moan
Where you rest, Aroon?
When the wild tree bore
The deep blue cherry,
In night’s deep hall
Our love kissed merry.
But you come no more
Where its woodlands call,
And the grey days fall
On my grief, Astore.