Anniversary: The poet Francis Ledwidge was killed at Ypres 87 years ago today. His life was representative not just of a time but of a people, writes Gerald Dawe.
Born in 1887 in Slane and killed at Ypres on July 31st 1917, Francis Ledwidge's short life has left many powerful resonances, as a man of places such as Slane, Navan, particular townlands, distinctive landscapes; of barracks, avenues, shop names and beyond, to scenes in England such as Basingstoke and the theatres of war in Serbia and Belgium. He is a man individualised by his consistently close relationships with people: his mother, the family circle, his friends and girlfriends. There is a definition and rootedness about the man and yet a desire, courage and ambition to "see the world". There is nothing insular about him.
The life story as we have it to date, thanks largely to the researches of Alice Curtayne and Liam O'Meara, is a representative life not just of a time but of a people. To understand Ledwidge is to understand the complex reality of this country. His life tells the fascinating story of the tensions of a traditional Irish rural past, characterised by all the cultural resources of a deep-seated respect for learning and argument. This cultural richness was set against the real economic hardship which went with such a life and the lack of opportunities outside of agricultural work.
There is a dignity and forbearance about Ledwidge that impressed both those with whom he had dealings as a writer - including Lord Dunsany, Katherine Tynan and others - as well as the neighbours and fellow workers of his youth and young manhood, who were beguiled by his storytelling and his very special, dramatising self-awareness.
Like the young Charles Donnelly, who died in Spain in 1937, Ledwidge's political and trade union commitments place him as one of the voices of an emerging Ireland. He was part of that modernising, progressive force in the early decades of the last century, even while most of his poems looked back to an Irish idyll of romantic longing, replicating Gaelic rhythms and mythology as his friend, Thomas MacDonagh, had recommended.
Ledwidge embodies, in Seamus Heaney's phrase, the "conflicting elements in the Irish inheritance". This is what makes him such an important figure in our current debates about cultural identity. The Great War represented the shock of the new, as much as the horror of the human carnage. Had Ledwidge survived it, his own poetry may well have adjusted to the radically changed inner world of his personal life. First World War veteran Thomas Mac Greevy comes to mind.
Historian George Boyce remarks that "rightly, if belatedly, the Great War" is now being seen "as central to the forging of Irish identities". Ledwidge should stand centre-stage in any such re-imagining of how "Irish identities" were (and are being) forged. Heaney considers that Ledwidge is best read "in the company of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon" as "a war poet". Like Owen, he revered Keats; like Sassoon - who wrote poems in the Limerick garrison in the winter following Ledwidge's death - he had a deep love of the countryside. Ledwidge's life reaches out from the last decades of the 19th century into the second decade of the 20th. Engaged on the ground with the most important issues of his time, he touched various different religious traditions and class backgrounds, from Meath to Dublin, Belfast to Derry, and in England.
He created a volume of work which deserves critical attention alongside that of other lesser-known writers with whom he lived and worked. The literary, social and cultural history of his time remains opaque. Somehow or other we need to rediscover what, if anything, that time actually means to us today; indeed, whether or not we should care any more.
Perhaps an inclusive anthology of 20th-century Irish "war poetry" from the first World War, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War, the Emergency, the second World War and the Holocaust might be an appropriate literary gesture and a powerful educational statement.
Such a volume would also prove a lasting testament to the thousands of Irish men and women who, like Francis Ledwidge, gave their lives for what they considered to be just causes, at home and abroad.
• This is an extract from the Francis Ledwidge Day lecture given by Gerald Dawe in Slane, Co Meath, last Sunday
• Gerald Dawe's poetry collections include The Morning Train (1999) and Lake Geneva (2003). He lectures at TCD