Francis Ledwidge
1887-1917

Ledwidge, son of a farm labourer, was born on 19 August 1887 outside Slane, Co. Meath. He left school at thirteen and held various jobs, once giving up an apprenticeship in Dublin to walk thirty miles back to the region he loved. He was sacked from a copper mine for organising a strike and was working on the roads when, in 1912, he sent a notebook of poems to the author Lord Dunsany. Dunsany greeted him as a true poet and introduced his work to influential friends in London and Dublin.

As the Home Rule crisis deepened, Ledwidge became secretary of the Slane corps of the Irish Volunteers. Dunsany had persuaded Herbert Jenkins to publish a collection of his poems under the title Songs of the Fields, writing an introduction which recalled Robert Burns and John Clare before dubbing Ledwidge 'the poet of the blackbird'. However, when war broke out in August 1914, publication was postponed. Ledwidge was now unemployed, and Dunsany settled an allowance on him. When the Slane Volunteers answered John Redmond's call to fight in France, Ledwidge dissented, yet within days joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. His motives were confused. He was escaping from an unsuccessful romance. He would not have it said he stayed at home while the British army 'stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation'. He fought 'neither for a principle, nor a people, nor a law, but for the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them'.

Songs of the Fields was published in 1915, shortly before Ledwidge saw service at Gallipoli and Salonika and was hospitalised in Egypt and Manchester. Dunsany now helped Ledwidge collect Songs of Peace before the poet was sent to the Western Front. On 31st July 1917 Ledwidge was killed during the third battle of Ypres. Songs of Peace was published three months later, and Dunsany made a further compilation, Last Songs (1918).

Ledwidge's birthplace, outside Slane on the Drogheda Road, is now a museum. A plaque on the Boyne bridge in Slane draws on his poem on Thomas MacDonagh, executed in 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 the Appletree Press title: Famous Irish Writers.
Also from Appletree: Irish Museums and Heritage Centres.