Francis Ledwidge
was an Irish nationalist who joined the British Army in October of 1914 to
defend Ireland and further the cause of Irish Home Rule. With the 10th Irish Division, he
fought in Gallipoli and was injured in Serbia. Known as “the Poet of the Blackbird,” Ledwidge lived to see only one
volume of his poetry published: Songs of
the Fields (1915).
In the spring of
1916, Ledwidge was on leave, passing through Manchester on his way home to
Ireland, when he received news of the 1916 Easter Rising and the execution of
his friend, fellow poet, and Easter Rising leader, Thomas MacDonagh. Ledwidge
extended his stay in Ireland without permission, spoke out in favor of the
Easter Rising, and was court-martialed upon his return to the Western Front.
Although he
continued to serve with the British Army and was eventually promoted to the
rank of lance corporal, the events of the First World War and the Easter Rising
intensified Ledwidge’s allegiance to Ireland, and in his writings, the Irish
countryside is poignantly imagined as a symbol of hope and of peace.
In early 1917,
he wrote to another Irish poet, Katharine Tynan, “If I survive the war, I have
great hopes of writing something that will live. If not, I trust to be remembered in my own
land for one or two things which its long sorrow inspired.”* Ledwidge’s second
volume of poems, Songs of Peace, was
in press when he was killed on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele.
To One Dead
Ledwidge memorial |
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.
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.
--Francis
Ledwidge
Much like
Ledwidge’s short life, the repressed energy of the poem comes from holding
together and balancing contradictory ideas. Set against the swinging
movement of the bluebells and the wild blowing of the wind, a blackbird sits on a
moss-covered stone and sings in the stillness of a wood. The bird’s sorrowful song for the dead (the “wood’s
threnody”) dies into a silence that echoes with the pain of division.
Vast is the
distance between sea and wood, and nothing can bridge the chasm that separates
the voice of the poem’s speaker from the poem’s subject – the dead. Even the
rhymes of the poem echo the theme of estrangement: the first line of the poem delays
in finding its rhyming pair until the second stanza, leaving the rhymed
sounds separated by five intervening lines. Ledwidge’s melancholy poem accepts and wrings patterns
of beauty from tragedies of life and of war that cannot be changed.
During the
summer of 1917, Ledwidge waited for the publication of his second volume of
poetry as his unit prepared for another major battle on the Western Front. In one
of his last letters to Katharine Tynan, Ledwidge reminisced about Ireland and
home:
“I
would give £100 for two days in Ireland with nothing to do but ramble on from
one delight to another. I am entitled to a leave now, but I’m afraid there are
many before my name in the list. Special leaves are granted, and I have to
finish a book for the autumn. But, more particularly, I want to see again
my wonderful mother, and to walk by the Boyne to Crewbawn and up through the
brown and grey rocks of Crocknaharna. You have no idea of how I suffer with this
longing for the swish of the reeds at Slane and the voices I used to hear
coming over the low hills of Currabwee. Say a prayer that I may get this leave,
and give as a condition my punctual return and sojourn till the war is over. It
is midnight now and the glow-worms are out. It is quiet in camp but
the far night is loud with our guns bombarding the positions we must soon fight
for.”**
On July 31, 1917, Francis Ledwidge
and five other men of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were killed by a stray artillery shell that landed behind the lines. Ledwidge is buried at Artillery
Wood Cemetery in Belgium; his grave is only steps away from that of the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn,
who also died that day. The silence and sorrow can still be felt in the small cemetery outside Ypres.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Alice Curtayne,
Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet. Martin
Brian and O'Keeffe, 1972, p. 170.
**Ibid, pp.
185-186.
***For other
Ledwidge poems, see the posts “It
is terrible to be always homesick” and “Soft
and slow in wartime.”
Sure is an interesting look at this poem
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading and responding!
DeleteI appreciate the background and great explanation on each poem.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading and replying, Katie!
DeleteFantastic - thank you - I go to Ypres next month, I will send you pics.
ReplyDeleteArtillery Wood is a special place -- thanks, Graham!
DeleteHow I envy you the time you get to spend with these poems. Marvelous as always.
ReplyDeleteTom, you're exactly right -- I'm enormously privileged to spend time with these poems!
DeleteNo John Drinkwater celestial chimney-pots for Ledwidge! Your post brought to mind H.H. Munro's quite wonderful Birds on the Western Front" http://tnsatlanta.org/wp-content/uploads/Birds-on-the-Western-Front-Saki.pd
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the connection with HH Munro -- lovely! "In the chill, misty hour of gloom that precedes a rainy dawn, when nothing seemed alive except a few wary waterlogged sentries and many scuttling rats, the lark would suddenly dash skyward and pour forth a song of ecstatic jubilation that sounded horrible forced and insincere."
DeleteWith Hedd Wyn's grave merely a couple of rows away from Francis's, Artillery Wood might well be called a poet's final resting-place. More, the cemetery is hardly a mile away from Steenstrate, the Ypres hamlet where lethal gas was used for the very first time in the history of human warfare.
ReplyDeleteTo sum it all up, it is a spot that has preserved war literature and man's cruel inventiveness in wartime in its very veins.