Official launch of the Francis Ledwidge site

The Francis Ledwidge site was officially launched in Slane by Myles Dungan on Thursday, 14th April 2005.

Address by Myles Dungan
There is a sense in which the poet Francis Ledwidge is an anomaly, insofar as he is a veteran of the First World War who (unlike so many other World War veterans) is actually remembered. The real anomaly however lies in the fact that he is remembered primarily for a poem about a military event in which he played no part. I refer of course to the famous elegy for Thomas McDonagh, executed leader of the 1916 Rising.

Ledwidge's motives for enlisting in the Great War were many. Firstly, he was taunted and provoked into it by the gibes of his Redmondite fellow Navan rural district councillors who accused him of being pro-German in his initial reluctance to join up. Secondly, he had almost certainly been let down in love by the great romance of his life Ellie Vaughey. In addition we must assume that his poetic patron, Lord Dunsany, would have played some role in his actions. However, I believe his primary motive was idealistic - like his fellow poet Tom Kettle, he identified German imperialism as a force for evil in European affairs and an impediment to European peace and harmony. He himself wrote: "I joined the British army because 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 at home but pass resolutions." His decision therefore was one born out of great moral and physical courage.

In the Introduction to Dermot Bolger's selection of Ledwidge poems, published in 1992, Seamus Heaney said of the Slane poet that his work was appropriated by an Ireland that is pious and demure "as a charm against all that modernity which threatened the traditional values of a country battening down for independence." However, Heaney went on: "Ledwidge's fate had been more complex and modern than that. He deliberately chose not to bury his head in local sand." I suggest that in fact he gave his life in the cause of modernity, in the cataclysm that clearly separates the old world from the new. It will always be a great 'what if?' but had he returned alive, and had he survived the subsequent upheavals in which he would undoubtedly have played a part, it is impossible to see him writing poetry in the style of an age which had, almost literally, 'exploded' in front of his eyes.

The Rising, Ledwidge's background with the McNeill rump of the Volunteers in the wake of the Redmondite split, his identification with the ideals of the rebellion (which would have probably have been one part Connolly, two parts McDonagh) and his friendship with many of its leaders indubitably led to his being conflicted at a very deep level from 1916 until his death at Ypres in July, 1917. His seething resentment at what had happened and what was happening in his own country led directly to his court-martial (and to the poem "After Court Martial"). In fact he might be the model for a character in Sebastian Barry's new novel, A Long, Long Way, whose disgust with the uniform he is wearing after 1916 and his own great self-loathing is so great that he, effectively, engineers his own execution. The analogy is of course not precise (Sebastian Barry based this character on a member of his extended family) but it is nonetheless highly suggestive.

Seamus Heaney sees Ledwidge as bridging two Irelands: his reverence for Lord Dunsany, on the one hand, and that for Thomas McDonagh, on the other; his playing of both cricket and Gaelic Games. These dualities are testimony to a wonderfully complex Ireland which was almost lost to the simplistic but all-pervasive post-Treaty dynamic. In his own person, Ledwidge reflected the dilemma of so many Irish veterans of the Great War - namely, how to continue to fight for a power that had shown itself to be as repressive as the Kaiser's Germany. And of course he also reflect the conflicted idealism which brought many of the 40,000 or so members of Ireland's lost generation to Flanders, Picardy and Gallipol in the first place.

Returning to "what if?', it is unlikely, had he lived, that he would have approved of the new post-Treaty dispensation, of the new Irish overlords who took control in the 1920's - those whom Roddy Doyle has written about so vividly in A Star Called Henry. Ledwidge would have been much more likely to have identified with the agricultural labourers who struck against their exploitative Irish employers, some of whom, indeed, ended up squeezed in an unholy alliance between the Black and Tans and the IRA.

Francis Ledwidge had many intimations of mortality while he served on the Eastern and Western fronts (he wrote to his friends Mattie McGoona and Katherine Tynan about his foreboding that he would not return alive). Hence it may be possible to suggest that the poem "Thomas McDonagh" be read as an elegy for himself. Lying in a grave in Belgium he was even further removed from "the bittern's cry" than was the executed 1916 leader. Hence, while the plaque erected to the memory of Ledwidge in Slane carries this - very beautiful - poem as his epitaph, I would like to make a claim that a different poem would serve as an epitaph which might be truer to the fate of this exiled soul. It is "A Soldier's Grave", published posthumously in Last Songs, and reads as follows:

Then in the lull of midnight, gentle arms
Lifted him slowly down the slopes of death
Lest he should hear again the mad alarms
Of battle, dying moans, and painful breath.

And where the earth was soft for flowers we made
A grave for him that he might better rest.
So, spring shall come and leave it sweet arrayed
And there the lark shall turn her dewy nest.

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