If Francis Ledwidge is remembered today it is as the peasant poet from Slane discovered by the local aristocrat and writer Lord Dunsany, who enlisted in the British army in 1914 and who, on hearing of the Easter Rising and the execution of Thomas MacDonagh, was inspired to write the lament by which he is known to older generations of schoolchildren, with its line “He shall not hear the bittern cry,” before being blown to pieces near Ypres on July 31st, 1917.
This indispensable Selected Poems reveals a very different story. It is introduced by Seamus Heaney, who gets to the crux of the critical matter of Ledwidge as poet: "You were not keyed and pitched like those true-blue ones."
But it is the afterword – actually a fascinating, moving and at times autobiographical essay by Dermot Bolger – that yanks Ledwidge sharply into focus. Bolger’s account of Ledwidge’s life and work is mingled with his own journey as a writer, in which an imaginative encounter with Ledwidge plays a crucial, enabling role in his finding his voice.
His interest sparked by the poem he learned at school, the teenage Bolger realises that the route tramped home from Dublin to Slane by the teenage Ledwidge, escaping from a disastrous apprenticeship to a Rathfarnham grocer, passes through Bolger’s native Finglas. He resolves to trace the poet’s footsteps back to his birthplace and arrives in Slane. A suspicious local policeman handles him roughly at first but then turns out to be one of the people trying to preserve the derelict cottage from demolition.
Ledwidge was born in this cottage, now a museum, to a destitute widow and mother of nine, into the class of landless farm labourers. Leaving school at 13, he worked in the fields, in the kitchens of Slane Castle and as a road builder. There was also a period in the copper mines, where Ledwidge, appalled by the conditions, tried to unionise the workers, which cost him his job. But he had also started to write poetry, which led to Dunsany’s patronage.
He would become secretary of Meath Labour Union and was even elected to Navan rural district council. In addition he was acting secretary of the Slane branch of the Irish Volunteers. When the war broke out and Redmond encouraged the Volunteers to fight with the British, there was the famous split, with most volunteers following Redmond, leaving behind the IRB-dominated rump. Ledwidge sided with the rump, but then, a few weeks later, he enlisted with the Inniskilling Fusiliers.
Why? People’s motivations are rarely pure and singular. Some say a tragic love affair, and he himself put it down to being “the helpless child of circumstance”. But Ledwidge also claimed he was fighting for Ireland, like hundreds of thousands of other Irishmen, writing, post-1916, “For am I not of those who reared / The banner of old Ireland high / From Dublin town to Turkey’s shores?”
The answer from the new state would be negative, as in its early years it imposed a single historical narrative on a complex and contradictory situation, and men like Ledwidge were written out of history.
It is remarkable how little resonance his political activism as a left-wing nationalist had in his poetry. It is as if, in poetry, he had only the voice that had been validated by Lord Dunsany and what he represented.
Nor did the horrors he endured and witnessed in Gallipoli, Serbia and France energise his poetic imagination to create the stripped-down minimalism of other war poets. In the classic anthology of war poetry Up the Line to Death he is represented by a single, quite conventional poem, Soliloquy, which ends: "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."
But, as Bolger points out, there was a missing last line, dropped by his publishers for many years: “A little grave that has no name / Whence honour turns away in shame.” In that last line, perhaps, we catch a tantalising flavour of the poet Ledwidge might have become.
He emerges from Bolger’s wide-ranging essay as an emblematic poet of the Ireland that was not hidden but suppressed in plain view. In its deprivation, contradictions and thwarted ambition, its struggle to attain even the faint, brittle voice we now have, his frustrated, and often tormented life is indeed emblematic of the experience of many people under the rule of the Free State and Republic he did not live to see come into being.
Michael O'Loughlin's most recent book is Poems 1980-2015
