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
These are undoubtedly the best-known lines by the Meath-born poet Francis Ledwidge, who was killed by an exploding shell at Ypres on July 31st, 1917. Yet it is a particularly Irish irony to reflect that the lines refer not to a soldier lying dead in the Flanders mud, as many think, but to the man whose name also provides the poem's title, Thomas McDonagh.
Unlike the celebrated British war poets - Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas - Francis Ledwidge and Tom Kettle have long occupied an uncertain place within Irish history and literature.
Ledwidge died fighting for Britain as a lance-corporal in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, but he also eulogised the republican McDonagh, who was executed by a British firing squad in Dublin in 1916 . These apparently conflicting facts about poem and poet seem to symbolise perfectly our complex attitude to the Irish who died in the Great War. Seamus Heaney, in his poem In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge, describes him as "our dead enigma".
Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane in 1887, the son of an evicted tenant. He worked as a farm labourer, miner, grocer's clerk, and road overseer. His early poems were published in the Drogheda Independent. In 1914 Ledwidge joined the British army, and in 1916 his first collection of poems Songs of the Fields, was published. Other poems, written at the front, were published posthumously, including The Place.
And when the war is over I shall take My lute a-down and sing again ... But it is lonely now in winter long, And God! to hear the blackbird sing once more.
For him, as for many others in the trenches, it was not to happen: a wreath of commemoration was laid on his grave at Ypres on the anniversary of his death this year. Thomas Kettle, known to all as Tom Kettle, was born in 1880 in Dublin. His background was almost the reverse of Ledwidge's. The son of Andrew Kettle, who was one of the main founders of the Land League, he was educated in University College Dublin, where he won the Gold Medal for Oratory.
Called to the bar in 1905, he practised law until 1908, when he was appointed the first professor of national economics at UCD. Kettle was many things: poet and orator, essayist, journalist, and politician. He was in Belgium when war was declared, having gone there to obtain arms for the Irish Volunteers, whom he had joined in 1913. Kettle stayed on in Belgium, working as a war correspondent for the Daily News.
On his return to Ireland, Kettle joined the Dublin Fusiliers, reasoning that pay-off time from Britain would come after the war. He did not anticipate the 1916 Rising. He was sent to France. In September 1916 he was killed while leading his men over no man's land at Ginchy.
It remains unclear what happened to his body, but there is an official memorial statue to him in St Stephen's Green. On it is an extract from his most famous poem, To My Daughter Betty. The lines could double as an epitaph for Kettle himself and for many of the 50,000 who died in the Great War from the island of Ireland.
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor - But for a dream, born in a herds- man's shed, And for the secret Scripture of the poor.
