The
war poetry of Francis Ledwidge is little known and frequently dismissed as
being overly dreamy and disconnected from the reality of the trenches. An Irishman
from County Meath, Ledwidge was a poet before the war, and he writes of
folklore, fairies, and the country landscapes of his home.
Shortly
after enlisting, in November of 1914 he wrote to a friend, “This life is a
great change to me, and one which somehow I cannot become accustomed to. I have lived too much amongst the fields and
the rivers to forget that I am anything else other than the ‘Poet of the
Blackbirds.’”
Ledwidge’s poetry is strikingly different from the better-known
works of other trench poets. His imagery
yearns towards beauty and serenity; his poems written on the front lines are
pastoral and melancholic, yet just as true to his experience as anything
written by Owen or Sassoon.
Rather
than describe the horrors surrounding him, Ledwidge escapes to a world of the
imagination, or as Keats writes in “Ode to a Nightingale,” he flees from the present
sufferings on “the viewless wings of Poesy.” Writing to Lord Dunsany (a fellow Irish
writer), Ledwidge explained, “It is
surprising what silly things one thinks of in a big fight. I was lying one side of a low bush on August
15th, pouring lead across a little ridge into the Turks, and for
four hours, my mind was on the silliest things of home.”
His
short poem “War” is more reminiscent of the writing of Yeats and the Lake Isle
of Innisfree than of muddy, bloody trenches – it is replete with images of
Ledwidge’s home. He personifies War as a brother to the wind and thunder, as one
with the darkness. Throughout the poem, War
is imagined as both frightening and yet strangely comforting in its
associations with nature and the more familiar fears of the poet’s native
landscapes.
Darkness
and I are one, and wind
And
nagging thunder, brothers all.
My
mother was a storm. I call
And
shorten your way with speed to me.
I
am the love and Hate and the terrible mind
Of
vicious gods, but more am I,
I
am the pride in the lover’s eye,
I
am the epic of the sea.
In
the poem, War is imagined as a child, with a stormy mother, and its siren call
draws men, shortening their journeys and their lives, as if this might be seen
as a good thing. War is not only “Hate”
and the “terrible mind/Of vicious gods,” but it is also love and “the pride in
the lover’s eye.”
How
can war be love? Love of country...love for the ideals for which one
fights...love for one’s comrades? And how might war be associated with pride
and lovers? This line
offers an intriguing contrast to Sassoon’s “Glory of Women,” as it seems to affirm (though
not celebrate) the glory and honour for which men fight, recalling the epic
wars of the past in which sailors such as Odysseus journeyed home across the
sea.
Ledwidge
was killed on the first day of the battle of Passchendale by an artillery
shell. In a letter to Katherine Tynan,
another Irish poet, he wrote in 1917, “I am a unit in the Great War, doing and
suffering, admiring great endeavour and condemning great dishonour. I may be dead before this reaches you, but I
will have done my part. Death is as interesting
to me as life. I have seen so much of
it, from Sulva to Serbia, and now in France.
I am always homesick. I hear the
roads calling, and the hills, and the rivers wondering where I am. It is terrible to be always homesick.”
Virginia
Woolf reviewed his posthumous book of poetry in The Times Literary Supplement in 1918, writing, “Most of Mr.
Ledwidge’s poems are about those little things…as common as the grass and sky…And
you come to believe in the end that you, too, hold these things dear.”
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*The
superb illustrated poetry collection Above
the Dreamless Dead: World War I in Poetry and Comics includes a wonderful
interpretation of this poem by the artist S. Harkham.
Lovely post, as always. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThanks, as always, for reading and commenting, Josie.
ReplyDelete