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The Art of a Minor Poet

LOUIS C. ZUCKER

The University of Wisconsin

FRANCIS LEDWIDGE was born of Irish peasants in Slane, a village the quintessence of pastoral Meath. At sixteen, he was in Dublin, a grocer's clerk; but he broke away and tramped thirty miles to his mother's cottage, so poignant was even now his undying home-longing. In 1913, he sent an old copy-book full of verses to Lord Dunsany to learn whether there was any good in them. Lord Dunsany hailed the peasant lad, whom he found roadmending in Meath, as the pure singer of Nature he had been lonely for; and until the end he was Ledwidge's editor. In 1914, Ledwidge joined Dunsany's battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. He served at the Dardanelles and Soloniki, in Servia and Egypt. He fell in Flanders in 1917, at the age of twenty five. A short while before the sudden end, he wrote to Katharine Tynan,-who has affirmed of him, that "Unlike Burns, he was all gentlehood"-"I am always home-sick. I hear the roads calling and the hills and the rivers wondering where I am . . . You have no idea of how I suffer with this longing for a swish of the reeds at Slane."

His published books are: Songs of the Fields (1916), Songs of Peace (1917) and Last Songs (1918), with Introductions by Lord Dunsany and published by Herbert Jenkins, London.

No other poet so often rises out of Ledwidge's poems as Yeats; and first knowledge will see Ledwidge germane to Keats; an ardent brightness of line, in later poems, trails the flame of Herrick. Yet, above all, he is unlike these othersYeats takes the charms of open nature as material for a beauty of his own ideal, and for symbolic beauty-he transmutes his first vision of the earth, keeping only a few actual traditional things for permanent symbols; Keats and Herrick

are Hellenes, to whom nature comes in flame, and for whom her overflowing sensuousness is a stir to the voluptuousness of the rose-sandalled philosophers; but Ledwidge holds to his immediate absolutely natural vision, as a naïve nature—voluptuary, and so he remains.

Slane is his universe-likely, it is the ordinary ancient Irish village, as fertile and quiet as the old places in Andalusia—as beautiful, in season, as the constellated skies, and as unexciting to the sane. But for this Irish peasant, the skies and flowers and birds, with all their soul-influencing galaxies, are his vital being. With his clear, knowing eye and love of place of the old race, and his abnormal fervor, he perceives the growing, moving things, flora or fauna-hardly any unfamiliar thing— and puts into his book, not merely their color and sound, but the grace, élan, mood, seemingly human purposefulness, nervous temper, of their motion or stillness-actual or divined. In the wake of the stirred silences of the early evening, he feels far splendors flicker ("In the Mediterranean"). He knows the life that is acting out in hollows; he finds the glittering pleasure hidden by other admired things. And this whole virile play of the élan vital, in all its gradations, almost imperceptible reverberations, vividly discerned and heightened, set in native spaces and artless infinitudes of pure blue or flaming-white, lives upon his saint-white soul, communicating to him immediately its feelings, so that his poems give the life, in all fulness of beauty, in its air, its own feeling, the poet's feel of the whole, the disturbance in his heart-as has been said, in a naïve, sturdy simplicity, with a ripening sense of the pathos of it all.

Such is his world-without the witching persons and communal play of Herrick, without the pervasive concern with vivid human semblances of Keats or Rossetti; the personages he alludes to are, almost all, shadowy and have the same part in his settings as human figures do in post-impressionist landscapes. And his apperception admits only the Slane which the lone tiller in the fields, in the line of a time-old knowledge, can know. More explicity he sings

In "The Homecoming of the Sheep" do you catch Slane or Hellas?

IN FRANCE

The silence of maternal hills

Is round me in my evening dreams;

And round me music-making bills

And mingling waves of pastoral streams.

Whatever way I turn I find

The path is old unto me still.

The hills of home are in my mind,

And there I wander as I will.
February 3rd, 1917.

When the pangs of disappointment, of bitter wisdom, get barnacled in his soul, he still perceives them lyrically, as peculiar arrangements of his cosmos, turning his heart asmoulder, the while, perhaps, certain persons are before his vision; and when he is moved to analysis of emotion in a person, where he speaks out of his primordial mind, the outward signs and changes take him always to his skies, fields, and loves there habitationed,-beautiful for their own gorgeous lyric sake

first.

You looked as sad as an eclipsèd moon

Above the sheaves of harvest, and there lay
A light lisp on your tongue, and very soon
The petals of your deep blush fell away;
White smiles that come with an uneasy grace
From inner sorrow crossed your forehead fair,
When the wind passing took your scattered hair
And flung it like a brown shower in my face.
(Before the Tears)

In his seclusive way, he approaches the heart of mankindof plain, rural, perhaps untutored mankind,-by way of solitary things once used, now cast-off: old far-wandered boots,by way of lonely places, marked with the vicissitudes or anodynes of men-"the battered bin that heard the ragman's story," "blackened places where . . . circuses made din❞—by way of solitary or thronging somber places, deeming it

"Noble love

To sing of live or dead things in distress

And wake memorial memories above."

Such is for Ledwidge the greater workaday world-storied driftings along his unchanging lanes. Yet, beloved and nat

ural as his world is to him, certain of the ardently imaginative modern poets have turned his undertow of slight, unapparent wearying to a fitful hankering after fiery, mysteriously sensuous places after Babylon [A.E.?] ("After My last Song").

Ledwidge feels his world with an earnest, divining, tender immediacy, a lyric rapture or lift of swelling heart; at times, with a hastening of rapturous beat, as in certain wild passages of Keats and Yeats, mingling appeals to our associations of tender, majestic, voluptuous, sweet-tuned, fantastic, imaginative beauty or, with the same artistic power, to our moods of tragic strangeness, forlornness, perpetual defeat, interblent always with splendid nature-sensuousness.

And evening found her thus, and night in state
Walked thro' the starlight, and a heavy tide
Followed the yellow moon around her wait,
And morning walked in wide.

She lifted up her eyes and said, "You're late."
Then shook her head and sighed.

(Waiting.)

When sundered from Slane, there rises in him a pounding, paining, yearning back to the luxuriance, gorgeous vitality, and peace; he has rapturous, burning vision of each particular space there, living in its own peculiar splendor; a break springs in his heart, and, out of it, a hot high-maned surge, aglitter with many-colored fragments of dear, futile memories, with all his vain longings and burdens, all mingled in the one passionate, hopeless sorrow. It is the consuming cry of the bird carried afar from its nest.

On the heights of Crocknaharna,
(Oh, thy sorrow Crocknaharna)
On an evening dim and misty
Of a cold November day,
There I heard a woman weeping
In the brown rocks and the grey.
Oh, the pearl of Crocknaharna
(Crocknaharna, Crocknaharna),
Black with grief is Crocknaharna
Twenty hundred miles away.
(Crocknaharna)

Most inly, Ledwidge has spoken in the lines,

"Like stepping-stones within a swollen river

The hidden words are sounding in my brain."

A naïve nature-worshipper, his being, at first, mainly in the world outside him, caressing of the gentle and the frail, kindled with the bright and the dynamic, with a deep racial feeling for the legendary, a son of the golden naked light, he was early fain of the majestic halo of more somber elements. The defeats which come perpetually to men of feeling were bound to visit and deepen him also-the Great War would surely have done enough, unaided. But, being purely a personality of feeling-never as mature intellectually as Keatshe was easily affected by subtle emotional tendencies peculiar to such a personality, and by convergent influences from greater poetic minds. From reading, he early became anxious for profound-seeming motifs, and allowed himself to drift, under the influence, as I surmise, of Morris, Swinburne, Rossetti, Keats, Yeats, A. E. perhaps, and, it may be also, of certain modern Donnians-into a consciousness of weariness with Time's changes, a darkness of amorous passion as idle as Petrarch's, a submission to vague sorrow. Ledwidge's one absolutely personal plaint was his passionate pleasure in and longing for Slane the earth-child's love of place.

I'd make my heart a harp to play for you
Love songs within the evening dim of day,
Were it not dumb with ache and with mildew
Of sorrow withered like a flower away.

It hears so many calls from homeland places,

So many sighs from all it will remember,

From the pale roads and woodlands where your face is
Like laughing sunlight running thro' December.

(To Eilish of the Fair Hair)

Wherefore his devotion to the blackbird, as time out of mind associated in his soul with his home-fields, and also as symbol of Ireland as was the blackbird of Daricarn. He shares with impassioned sympathy the same emotion in Brooke. A little flock of clouds go down to rest

In some blue corner off the moon's highway,
With shepherd winds that shook them in the West

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