THE soldier-poet Francis Ledwidge was unlucky in love. When he was rejected by a local girl from Slane, Ellie Vaughey, for whom he developed a gripping infatuation, it gave impetus to his decision to join the British army. "I'm wild for wandering to far-off places/ Since one forsook me whom I held most dear", he wrote in " After My Last Song".
Of course, Ledwidge had higher motives of conscience in putting on the British uniform. He regarded enlisting as a moral responsibility, because as he later wrote, Britain “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 but pass resolutions”.
Class and land seem to have been a factor in the severed relationship. Ledwidge came from a humble background; the Vaugheys were landowners on the Hill of Slane.
When Ellie spurned Ledwidge, the rejected lover turned his romantic attention in another direction. Lizzie Healy, was the 20-year-old sister of a close friend of his, Paddy Healy, the schoolteacher in Slane.
When Ellie Vaughey died in childbirth, in Manchester in 1915, and the news reached Ledwidge, then in a barracks in England, it inspired one of his finest poems, " To One Dead".
A blackbird singing
On a moss-upholstered stone,
Bluebells swinging,
Shadows wildly blown,
A ship on the sea.
The song was for you
And the ship was for me.
The death of Ellie Vaughey reignited Ledwidge’s passion for her to an extent that his memories of their time together cast a shadow over his relationship with Lizzie, which he allowed to fade. The pity of that broken knot is that in Lizzie the poet seemed to have met a good match: she was, according to Ledwidge’s excellent biographer, Alice Curtayne, “imperious and self-willed” – and possessed books that were “a marvel in the poet’s eyes”.
As soon as it started, the relationship almost foundered over a poem and a bunch of violets. On Valentine's Day, 1915 Lizzie received the violets, but she also noted a love poem in the Meath Chroniclewhich she assumed was written by Ledwidge for her. The anonymous author of the rather poor piece of juvenilia and the violet-sender was not Ledwidge, as she later discovered to her disappointment and annoyance. This led to some cooling off on Lizzie's part; perplexity and embarrassment on Ledwidge's.
However, their relationship recovered. It appears it was conducted through a series of meetings that seem to have been clandestine but also through a flow of correspondence that is fascinating for what is also reveals about the poet’s deep affection for a part of Meath that lies about seven miles north of Navan, on the main road to Cavan – some distance from the poet’s more familiar terrain around the Boyne at Slane.
Wilkinstown, a small village not far from the harper O’Carolan’s birthplace in Nobber, was described by Curtayne as a place “of unusual charm on the edge of a bog”.
The village and the bog, the trees and its blackbirds, took hold of Ledwidge’s heart. Of course, the fact that Lizzie moved there with her sister and brother-in-law probably had a lot to do with the poet’s somewhat romantic view of it.
In 1915, from Richmond Barracks, he wrote to Lizzie, “it is spring now and it must be lovely down in Wilkinstown. Are the birds singing yet? When you hear a blackbird think of me”. “Poet of the blackbird” had been indelibly stamped on Ledwidge’s calling card by his literary patron, Lord Dunsany.
Curtayne paints an image that is still reflected in the village today: “It might have been designed for easy gossiping as its houses seem to have come together haphazardly in a sort of conspiratorial huddle and its street has inconsequent angles and curves that invite long pauses for chatting. Beyond this cosy cluster of houses and shops, the road turns north-east to cross a great elevated sprawl of open bog, forming an exhilarating vista . . .” Ledwidge carried his own images of the bog with him, even into the trenches: “I am sure it is lovely in the bog now. I would much like to be walking to Carlanstown via Fletcherstown chapel”. That bog with its “exhilarating vista” lies beyond the quaint, light-filled Fletcherstown chapel. He makes a number of references in his letters to cycling from Slane to Wilkinstown and out by the bog road.
“The birds sing here too”, he wrote from his Basingstoke camp, “but my thoughts are in Slane and on the road to the bog”. And in another letter to Lizzie he tells her of discovering a Hampshire bog where he settled into a little copse to “dream of the bog far away”.
With his regiment, Ledwidge was despatched to Gallipoli where he survived one of the most hellish battles of the war. His “wandering to far-off places” then took him to the equally harsh conditions in Serbia, where his only consolation was the arrival of his first collection, Songs of the Fields.
A period of recuperation included a brief return to Ireland just after Easter 1916 – an event that prompted in Ledwidge some self-questioning about his role in the British army. It also led to perhaps his greatest and certainly his best-loved poem, “Lament for Thomas McDonagh”.
Lizzie had by then moved from Wilkinstown and Co Meath to work in Dún Laoghaire.
Even though the poet actually spent part of that final visit home in Dublin, he made no attempt to see her. He returned to "the mad alarms of battle, dying moans and painful breath", as he described it in " A Soldier's Grave".
In France he survived the Battle of Arras in 1917 but was then sent to Belgium where, 94 years ago tomorrow, he died in the third Battle of Ypres. Two weeks before his death, he broke his years of silence and wrote again to Lizzie. “Please, dear Lizzie, send me a flower from the bog”.
As part of Ledwidge Day in Slane Castle tomorrow, Gerard Smyth will give a reading and talk under the title, " It Must Be Lovely Down in Wilkinstown - On Sharing Common Ground with Francis Ledwidge".