Behind Their Lines: Ledwidge

Showing posts with label Ledwidge. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

To One Dead

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 10^th 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.

--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.”

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Soft and slow in wartime

Ledwidge (on right) with his mother

As I wrote in an earlier post ("It is terrible to be always homesick"), the poetry of Francis Ledwidge is strikingly different from the better-known works of other trench poets. His imagery yearns towards beauty and serenity, and his poems written on the front lines are pastoral and melancholic, just as true in their own way to the experience of war as anything written by Owen or Sassoon.

Born on August 19^th, 1887, the "Poet of the Blackbirds," like many men in the muddy trenches of the First World War, coped with the tragedy and tedium of life on the Western Front by dreaming of home and imagining himself returning there.

Home

Ledwidge memorial

A burst of sudden wings at dawn,
Faint voices in a dreamy noon,
Evenings of mist and murmurings,
And nights with rainbows of the moon.

And through these things a wood-way dim,
And waters dim, and slow sheep seen
On uphill paths that wind away
Through summer sounds and harvest green.

This is a song a robin sang
This morning on a broken tree,
It was about the little fields
That call across the world to me.

The poem revels in quietness. Rising above the din of battle, "faint voices" and "mist and murmurings" speak louder than shell bursts and cannon fire. The trill of a single robin on a blasted tree echoes for hundreds of miles, recalling bird song from across the Irish Sea.

The poem also moves with deliberate slowness. The sheep meander on uphill paths, and the leisurely movement of the day shifts from dawn to noon, then from evening to night. Time will not be hurried, but moves purposefully through the seasons, from "summer sounds" to "harvest green."

Frances Ledwidge

War and its frenzied tempo seem very far away – and that is the beauty and gift of this poem, written in mid-July of 1917, during a pause in the bombardment that preceded the Third Battle of Ypres. Ledwidge was killed two weeks later on July 31^st.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

It is terrible to be always homesick

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 15^th, 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.

War*

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.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*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.