Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Ledwidge, Francis
LEDWIDGE, FRANCIS (1891–1917), poet, born 19 June 1891 at Slane, co. Meath, was the eighth child of Patrick Ledwidge, an evicted tenant-farmer, afterwards a farm labourer, by his wife, Annie Lynch. Leaving the Slane national school at twelve, Ledwidge worked in the fields and also in domestic service. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a Dublin grocer; but this, like a later episode in a draper's shop, lasted only a few weeks. He went back to his native fields, which henceforth provided the many occupations which he followed for a livelihood. He was a ganger on the roads; then a copper-miner, until dismissed for fomenting a strike; then an overseer of roads for the Slane area. These occupations were tolerable, because they kept him close to the hedgerows, the birds, and the people that he loved. His first verses had already been printed in the Drogheda Independent, and he contemplated training himself for journalism. In June 1912 he sent a bookful of verse to Lord Dunsany, who gave him advice, material help, and introduction to the literary world. Though reviews began to take his poems, Ledwidge stuck to his rural occupation, interesting himself more deeply in the welfare of his village. He was secretary of the county Meath farm labourers' union, served on the Navan district council, and was insurance commissioner for the county. In October 1914, although a strong nationalist, he joined the 5th battalion Royal Inniskillings, to fight ‘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’. He served as lance-corporal at the Suvla Bay landing in Gallipoli (August 1915), was with the first detachment sent from Gallipoli to Salonika (October 1915), and fought through the Vardar retreat (December 1915). After a spell in hospital in Egypt, he was sent to France, and was killed in Belgium 31 July 1917. He was well-built, tall, with an eager, gentle face, arresting eyes, and dark soft hair. In manner he was reserved and shy, but without either conceit or self-consciousness. He was unmarried.
Ledwidge has been called the Burns and the Clare of the Irish, but he was not distinctively Irish in genius. Though his inspiration was drawn from the fields along the Boyne, its themes are common to rural poets through northern Europe—may-blossoms, roses of the lane, roadside birds upon the tops of dusty hedges, and especially the blackbird's song. His joy is purely sensuous; and his sorrow is at root the pagan grief that all things pass. The oaten straw was his natural instrument. When he puts it aside for the national harp and the conventions of the Celtic revival, he is hampered by a mythology too shadowy and portentous, except where it echoes the cradle songs of the country-side. He has more instinctive sympathy for the naturalistic myths of Pan and Proserpine. He is like Keats in other ways: in fitful dissatisfaction with the sensuousness of his genius, and in his gift for the magical phrase. But he had not even Keats's opportunities for improving his technique, especially in range of verse-craft.
Ledwidge's published works are Songs of the Field (1915), Songs of Peace (1916), Last Songs (1918), and Complete Poems (1919); a play, The Crock of Gold, is unpublished.
[Lord Dunsany's prefaces to Ledwidge's poems; H. R. Stannard in the Weekly Dispatch, 19 August 1917; Katharine Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, 1919; private information.]