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Gerard Smyth's Poetry Month Pick, April 2, 2009
To One Dead
by Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917)
A blackbird singing
On a moss-upholstered stone,
Bluebells swinging,
Shadows wildly blown,
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.
Gerard Smyth Comments:
At the time his second volume, Songs of Peace, was on the printing press in 1917, the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge was deep in the “muddy ranks of war” near Ypres in France. Before the book was published he was dead. The contrast between the book’s title and the horrors the soldier-poet witnessed during the time he wrote most of the posthumously published work is immediately striking.
Despite the hell-hole experiences he had been through, he eschewed images from the trenches and stuck to his sweeter themes. Ledwidge was a love poet and elegist; he introduced variations of mythology and legend into work, but first and foremost he was a nature poet of lyric fluency.
The natural world, with its changing seasons, was the nourishing muse that drove his imagination. Ireland’s Boyne valley, with its ancient and sacred sites and the pastoral landscape that enclosed his home village of Slane in County Meath haunted him, even when showers of blood and shrapnel were pouring down on him in the battlefield.
“I read of Troy and Ninevah and the Nomads of the Sahara. I wrote wander songs for the cuckoo and the winters songs for the robin. I hated gardens where gaudy flowers were trained in rows but loved the wild things of change and circumstance”, he once wrote.
The circumstances of Ledwidge’s life were humble — from an impoverished background and relatively uneducated, he worked as a farm labourer, road worker, garden boy, grocer’s assistant. He was not, however, a “peasant poet”, as his patron, mentor and editor of his collections, Lord Dunsany, a member of the local aristocracy, liked to describe him. He achieved in some of his later work especially a more ordered language, more subtle effects.
It is one of these later poems that probably is his best and certainly his best loved, a lament for one of the patriots of Ireland’s Easter rebellion of 1916.
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.
(from "Thomas McDonagh")
In my schooldays it was a poem we had to memorise for exams. What we did not much dwell on in an Irish classroom of the 1960s — just 50 years after that uprising — were the poet’s divided loyalties. Ledwidge, a fiercely committed Irish nationalist, was wearing a British army uniform at the time of the rebellion.
His dilemma of conscience brought its own inner torment but he was steadfast in his commitment to what he saw as a moral responsibility; he had no regrets at having enlisted in the British army because, as he later wrote, “She stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing but pass resolutions”.
In his powerfully evocative elegy "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge" the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney sees the doomed poet as
A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,
Ghosting the trenches with a bloom of hawthorn
Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.
Like the McDonagh poem, "To One Dead" is a lament but one much more intimately connected to personal grief. Ledwidge had loved a young woman called Ellie Vaughey who severed the relationship. She married another, but soon after died in childbirth. News of her death reached Ledwidge while he was in barracks in Britain. This compact and concise lyric opens with an almost obsessively recurring motif throughout his poetry: the image of the blackbird. In another of his poems he even refers to himself as a “bird-hearted singer”.
In this brooding memorial, his spare use of images from nature has a sophistication that earlier work lacked; blackbird and bluebells, and that ship on the sea all take on emblematic significance. A mood of unfulfilled yearning hangs over every line, with both human and natural worlds drawn together by the keening music, especially in those final, wistful lines of each stanza with their reiterated trope.
Perhaps what first opened my eyes to Ledwidge — apart from those classroom encounters — was familiarity with his terrain. My childhood and teen-year summers were spent in County Meath on the small farm where my mother was born, in a locality that was familiar to the poet. From this distance of time that place now seems like my own Arcadia.
It was where I found my first scriptorium and made my own fledgling attempts at poetry. I was 16, the same age as Ledwidge when he too wrote his first poem, ironically, while training as a grocer’s assistant in Dublin. The homesick poet abandoned his city job and walked the 30 miles back to Slane, the beginning of a journey that took to the grief of war and the grief of lost love that is so resonantly accommodated in "To One Dead".
About Gerard Smyth:
Gerard Smyth's sixth collection of poems, The Mirror Tent, was published in 2007. His work has appeared in literary journals in Ireland, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere since the late 1960s. He lives in Dublin where he is a Managing Editor with The Irish Times.
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