Francis Ledwidge

Francis Edward Ledwidge (19 August 1887 - 31 July 1917) was an Irish poet, sometimes known as the "poet of the blackbirds." A war poet of World War I, he was killed in action at the Battle of Passchendaele.

Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917), from The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge, 1919. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Francis Ledwidge
Born	August 19 1887(1887-Template:MONTHNUMBER-19) Janeville, Slane, co. Meath
Died	July Template:Dda Boezinge, Belgium
Occupation	Labourer, Miner, Soldier
Nationality	Irish
Period	1890s-1917
Genres	poetry
Influences Flecker, Keats, Shelley, Swinburne

Life

Family

Ledwidge was born 19 August 1887 at Janeville, Slane, co. Meath, 8th among 9 children of Patrick Ledwidge (1840/41–1892), a farm worker, and his wife, Anne (1853/4–1926), daughter of Nicholas Lynch of Slane.

The Ledwidges (the name is also found as Ledwick, Ledwich, and Ledwith) were of German origin and had come to Meath in the 13th century with the Anglo-Normans. After the reformation they shared the declining fortunes of landowners who had remained Roman catholic, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from many impoverished families. Yet the young Francis was taught by his mother to regard his ancestors proudly as ‘once a great people ... ever soldiers and poets’ who had long been a great landed power in the district (Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge, 15).

Youth and education

Patrick and Anne Ledwidge were poor, initially living in a tiny dwelling, where an older brother of Frank’s had died in infancy. In the early 1880s, however, they were able to move to a more spacious cottage in Janestown, where Francis (or ‘Frank’, as he was generally called) was born.

In 1892, however, when the youngest was only 3 months old, Patrick Ledwidge died suddenly, leaving his widow to provide for the family on outdoor relief of a shilling per week per child, and whatever else supportive neighbours might provide. She refused advice to place the children temporarily in care, and remained determined to keep the family and the home intact. To this end she worked for local farmers as a field hand, took in washing, and mended clothes.

In common with her late husband, she had a great respect for education, and when the eldest, Patrick, was made a school monitor, she hoped that he might ultimately train as a teacher, but he was now forced to leave school earlier to train as a bookkeeper and effectively became the family breadwinner. Tragically, he contracted tuberculosis and died within 4 years, and his burial had to be charged to the parish.

Anne Lynch's resilience was thus tested again, till some relief was provided by her 3rd son's apprenticeship to a Rathfarnham grocer.

Francis attended Slane national school, where he received a robust but wide-ranging education from its master, Thomas Madden. There he recalled being deeply moved by ‘The deserted village’ of Oliver Goldsmith. Madden cultivated in him a profound awareness of and familiarity with the folklore and prehistoric and historic sites that littered the Boyne valley, from ancient burial mounds and the Patrician Hill of Tara to monastic ruins and the eponymous battlefield of the Williamite war.

He spent what little money he made doing odd jobs on books such as The Arabian nights, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, and the poetry of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Longfellow; the last remained a particular favorite of his. He also became increasingly inspired by the Old Testament, Dante's Divine comedy, Homer's Odyssey, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne, Welsh romances, and Celtic sagas.

Ledwidge's mother's educational ambitions were frustrated by harsh economic reality. He left school at 13 to become a farmer's boy for a weekly wage of 7 shillings. His strong build, keen sense of humour, and rhyming fluency made him a popular employee, and he was an enthusiastic cricketer at a time when that sport was popular in the locality.

He began to write verses whenever he could, even on gates, fencing posts, and boulders, inspired by the pastoral landscape, flora, and bird life of the region.

Poet

Ledwidge in 1913. Courtesy FrancisLedwidge.com.

In 1907 Ledwidge became a road mender, then worked at a copper mine, where he organized a strike in 1910, before being appointed supervisor of roads. Meanwhile, encouraged by a local curate, Fr. Smyth, he became a regular contributor of poetry to the Drogheda Independent. He soon became aware of the Irish cultural revival. He sought unsuccessfully to establish a permanent Gaelic League presence in Slane, but his overtures received a sarcastic response from a regional luminary, Sean MacNamee. This fatefully closed an important avenue of connection for Ledwidge to leading contemporary literary circles.

Following the tragic death by drowning of Fr. Smyth, Ledwidge struck up a friendship with Matty McGoona, a talented violinist and voracious reader, who greatly encouraged his interest in Celtic mythology. He also developed an interest in hypnosis. He befriended an accomplished sculptor who had risen from humble origins, John Cassidy (1860–1939), who crucially advised him to seek the patronage of Lord Dunsany, poet, painter, writer, and a leading figure in the Irish literary renaissance.

On the face of it, Ledwidge and Dunsany came from different worlds, the latter possessing the 2nd-oldest Irish peerage. Dunsany had attended Eton and Sandhurst, and he had served as a Coldstream Guardsman in the South African war, but his own early literary trials made him sympathetic to struggling young writers. He eagerly took up the promotion of Ledwidge's career, introducing his pastoral and historical poetry in a lecture to the National Literary Society in October 1912. This earned Ledwidge the admiration of – among others – Padraic Colum, Brian O'Higgins, AE (George Russell), and Katharine Tynan.

Through Dunsany, he also met Oliver St John Gogarty, W.B. Yeats, Thomas MacDonagh, and W.F. Trench, sometime professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). In February 1913 Ledwidge was himself asked to contribute to the National Literary Society's deliberations. By the age of 25, then, he had become an established writer.

He had also fallen deeply in love with Ellie Vaughey, younger sister of close friends in co. Meath. He was desolate, however, when she reluctantly broke off the friendship, most probably because of the material gulf between him and her prosperous farming family. As he put it in the poem ‘A song’, he was ‘sad below the depth of words / That nevermore [they] two shall draw anear’, and a melancholia increasingly pervaded his poetry as a consequence.

Despite Ledwidge's growing association with the aristocratic Lord Dunsany, he retained a keen interest in conditions for working men. He had been a founder of the Slane branch of the Meath Labour Union in 1906, and he familiarised himself with the writings of James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, detecting no apparent contradiction between Christianity and socialism. In 1913 he became temporary secretary of the union, charged with overseeing the state insurance act of 1912, and early the following year he was elected to the Navan district rural council and board of guardians.

His mother's fortunes improved, supported by him and his younger brother, Joseph. However, he never fully recovered from the broken love affair with Ellie. His later intense romantic attachment to Lizzie Healey, sister of a local schoolmaster and friend, proved equally fruitless.

Soldier

He and Joseph were founder members of the Slane branch of the Irish Volunteers, in which they were very active as the crisis over the third home rule bill became acute. On the outbreak of war in Europe, he appeared to share strongly the views of those Volunteers who were critical of the call by John Redmond for Irishmen to support the British war effort.

Nevertheless, on 24 October 1914 Ledwidge joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, in which regiment Lord Dunsany had also enlisted, and he was soon promoted to lance-corporal. His patron was not a factor in his decision, however; Dunsany had settled a weekly allowance on Ledwidge to enable him to remain in Ireland to continue writing, an agreement that Ledwidge terminated on enlistment.

Whatever Ledwidge's misgivings, Redmondite fervour was strong in Meath and, lacking Gaelic League or Sinn Féin connections, he may well have been swept along by this tide of opinion. He later justified his joining the British army on the grounds that it ‘stood between Ireland and an enemy common to [their] civilisation’, preferring this course to staying at home ‘pass[ing] resolutions’. (Curtayne, Ledwidge, 83). He anticipated a speedy allied victory and hoped in vain for an early commission, as well as better-paid clerical work.

Although opposed to Ledwidge's enlistment, Dunsany continued to facilitate practically his poetic career. Ledwidge befriended Robert Christie, a Belfast protestant who shared his literary interests and became a constant regimental companion. Athletic in build, Ledwidge thrived on army discipline, but he was short of money, with Dunsany having to settle an embarrassing debt of £5 with AE.

Ledwidge was homesick, a condition heightened by the news that Ellie Vaughey had married. He managed to visit Slane while on leave, which inspired his fine poems, ‘A little boy in the morning’, in tribute to a local boy who had died suddenly. He renewed his friendship with Lizzie Healey, but it came to nothing. News of the death in childbirth of Ellie brought him renewed sadness.

Ledwidge was stationed in Basingstoke, England, parting with Dunsany, who was posted back to Ireland. In July 1915 he landed at Gallipoli and saw action for the first time near Sedd-el-Bahr alongside Australian and French troops, evading daily Turkish sniper fire; ‘a horrible and a great day [which he would] not have missed ... for worlds’ (Curtayne, Ledwidge, 127). In October, after evacuation from the Dardanelles, he arrived in Serbia, where his regiment endured many privations, including frostbite.

He was heartened, however, on receipt of an advance copy of Songs of the fields, which had been greeted enthusiastically by the British press, including the Review of Reviews. This earned him the somewhat overused bucolic epithet of ‘the poet of the blackbirds’. Critic Sir Edward Marsh published 3 of Ledwidge's poems in his Georgian Poetry.

Ledwidge injured his back in the retreat to Salonika and convalesced in military hospitals in Cairo and, by April 1916, Manchester. He was glad to ‘return to western civilization again’, and, on seeing the English landscape, thought he might have been an English patriot, were he not an Irish one (Curtayne, Ledwidge, 148).

In Manchester, however, Ledwidge heard news of the Easter rising, which greatly distressed him, as he had so admired Pearse and, especially, Connolly, while MacDonagh had been a personal friend whose execution inspired his poem ‘Thomas MacDonagh’, with the opening stanza of which Ledwidge would ever after be associated: ‘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.’ He clearly sympathised with ‘the dead men's dreams’ of the insurrection (Curtayne, Ledwidge, 157) and, along with his friend, Christie, he became disillusioned with the allied war effort.

He was court-martialled for insubordinate talk and overstaying his leave. Nevertheless, and in spite of an intense homesickness, he rejoined his regiment and, on transfer to a different battalion, was posted in December 1916 near to Amiens. He was sustained by correspondence with Dunsany and Katharine Tynan (Katharine Hinkson). He hoped that a new Ireland might arise from the ashes of war and thus no longer be the ‘Cinderella ... amongst the nations’ (Curtayne, Ledwidge, 180). Still, he valued the widening horizons afforded by his wartime experiences, and he took a renewed pride in Irish military valour in support of the allied cause.

In July 1917 his unit was ordered north to the Ypres salient. Even there, amid the horrors of the front line, he was moved in a lull in the bombardment by the sound of a robin, which inspired his poem ‘Home’.

The 3rd battle of Ypres (in which up to 135,000 British and dominion troops may have been killed over 3 months) began on 31 July. Ledwidge was kept in reserve, where he was engaged in road-making. Later that day, having attended confession the night before and received Holy Communion that morning from his Jesuit chaplain, he was caught by long-range German artillery fire and killed instantly. He was buried close by in Artillery Wood cemetery, Boesinghe (Boezinge), poignantly near to the grave of Ellis Humphrey Evans, alias ‘Hedd Wyn’, a leading contemporary Welsh poet, who was killed on the same day, at almost the same age.

Writing

Ledwidge's posthumously published Songs of peace (1917) contains his wartime poems as well as his elegy for MacDonagh. Last songs (1918) and Complete poems (1924) were edited by Lord Dunsany.

Critical reputation

Ledwidge's work as “peasant poet” and “soldier poet”, once a standard part of the Irish school curriculum, faded from view for many decades of the 20th century. Its intensity, coupled with a revived interest in his period, has restored it to life.

In the 1970s Ledwidge received renewed attention with the publication of Alice Curtayne's biography, a revised edition of his Complete Poems, and Seamus Heaney's elegy for Ledwidge (Field work, 1979) in which he is described as ‘our dead enigma’. Heaney provided a foreword to a new edition of Ledwidge's Selected poems which appeared in 1993.

Quotations

Memorial to Ledwidge, where he died, near Bossinge, Belgium. Photo by David Edgar, 2008. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Oh what a pleasant world 'twould be,
How easy we'd step thro' it,
If all the fools who meant no harm,
Could manage not to do it!

- From a personal letter

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 the 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.

- Lament for Thomas MacDonagh

Recognition

Ledwidge Cottage Museum, Slane, county Meath. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The Ledwidge Museum at Slane holds correspondence, manuscript poems, and memorabilia.

Against a background of growing interest in Ireland's involvement in the Great War, Ledwidge received further recognition in the unveiling of a memorial in the Island of Ireland Peace Park at Messines (Mesen), Belgium, on which is inscribed lines from his ‘Soliloquy’: It is too late now to retrieve / A fallen dream, too late to grieve / A name unmade, but not too late / To thank the gods for what is great; / A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart, / Is greater than a poet's art. / And greater than a poet's fame / A little grave that has no name.

A further monument to him was unveiled at the National War Memorial at Islandbridge, Dublin, in 2005.

In popular culture

Ledwidge was the subject of an RTÉ television documentary entitled Behind the Closed Eye, originally broadcast on January 18, 1973. It won awards for Best Story and Best Implementation Documentary at the Golden Prague International Television Festival.

In 2007 Dermot Bolger's play about the life of Ledwidge, Walking the Road (New Island Books, 2007), was staged in Dublin and in the Town Hall Theatre, Ieper, close to where Ledwidge died. It was commissioned to mark the 90th anniversary of his death.

Publications

Poetry

• Songs of the Fields. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1916; New York: Duffield, 1916.
• Songs of Peace. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1917.
• Last Songs. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1918.
• Complete Poems (with introduction by Lord Dunsany). London: Jenkins, 1918; New York: Brentano's, 1919.
• Complete Poems (edited by Alice Curtayne). London: Brian and O'Keeffe, 1974.
• Selected Poems (edited by Dermot Bolger). Dublin: New Island Books, 1992.
  • also printed as A Ledwidge Treasury: Selected poems (with introduction by Seamus Heaney & afterword by Bolger). Dublin: New Island Books, 2007.
• Poems (edited by Liam O'Meara), Dublin: Riposte Books, 1997. ISBN 1-870-49147-5
• The Best of Francis Ledwidge: When the dark cow leaves the moor (edited by Liam O'Meara; with introduction by Ulick O'Connor). Dublin: Inchicore Ledwidge Society, Risposte Books, 2004.
• Hubert Dunn, The Minstrel Boy (includes 5 previously unpublished poems by Ledwidge). Booklink, 2006.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

Behind The Closed Eye - Francis Ledwidge - Anúna

• British World War I poets
• List of Irish poets

References

• Donal Lowry, "Ledwidge, Francis Edward," Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009. Web, Aug. 27, 2022.

External links

Poems

• 3 poems by Ledwidge: "Autumn," "June," "A Rainy Day in April"
• Ledwidge, Francis (1891-1917) (4 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• Poems
• Francis Ledwidge at AllPoetry (47 poems)
• Francis Ledwidge at PoemHunter (49 poems)
• Francis Ledwidge at Poetry Nook (149 poems)

Audio / video

• Francis Ledwidge at YouTube

About

• Who Was Francies Ledwidge? at Gallipoli.rte.ie
• FrancisLedwidge.com Official website
• Francis Ledwidge obituary by Prof. Lewis Chase in The Cornhill Magazine 1917, 696–704; iIncludes autobiographical letter by Ledwidge to Chase dated June 6, 1917.
• Ledwidge, Francis in the 'Dictionary of National Biography
• Department of the Taoiseach: Irish Soldiers in the First World War

This article incorporates text from the Dictionary of Irish Biography, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license. Original article is at: Ledwidge, Francis Edward