"You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones Though all of you consort now underground". (From In memoriam: Francis Ledwidge by Seamus Heaney)
In September 1917 the Chief Bard of Wales called forward the winner of the National Eisteddfod to take his place on the bardic throne, the greatest honour for a Welsh poet. No one came forward. The Chief Bard called again; still no one stood. The Chief Bard turned and draped the throne in black cloth, laying a sword upon it. For the winning poem Yr Awr ("The Hero") had been written earlier that year by a soldier, Ellis Evans. Three months before the Eisteddfod, and two weeks after composing it, Ellis Evans, known by his poetic name Hedd Wynn, had been killed.
He was a poor farmer and shepherd from the hills of North Wales. His poetic journey, as a peasant in a rural, intensely Celtic society, mirrors in many ways that of Francis Ledwidge. He and Evans were strong nationalists, with Ledwidge an early member of the Irish Volunteers before joining the British Army. Evans was a reluctant soldier, though he cherished the fact that in his regiment there were "plenty of poets, for most of the men and officers are Welsh". He was conscripted. Although he never approved of the war he willingly took the place of his young teenage brother Bob, who was allowed to stay to work the family's small plot.
Both poets now lie in the little cemetery of Artillery Wood near Ypres in Belgium. It contains the remains of 800 soldiers, most of them killed in the early stages of the Third Battle of Ypres, the bloody four-month slugging match better known as Passchendaele. Along with Tom Kettle, if any poet represents the tragedy of the first World War for Ireland it is Ledwidge. For the Welsh, it is Evans who represents their poetic loss. Indeed he was the subject of the only Welsh language film to have been nominated for an Oscar: Hedd Wynn in 1992.
Before the war Ledwidge, a road labourer and union leader, had acquired a mild following as a poet. Fortunately for him he had also acquired a patron in Lord Dunsany, a leading figure in the Irish literary scene of the time, and major exponent of the Celtic twilight school of writing (Joyce's "Cultic Twalette"). Under Dunsany's patronage he had become involved with several of the poets in the Dublin Georgian group. When war came in 1914, Ledwidge joined the British Army as an infantryman - to defend, he said, the rights of small nations.
He experienced extensive combat on all the major fronts - Gallipoli, Serbia and the Western Front in France and Belgium. Yet bitterness rarely appears in any of his writings. Even when writing of his dead friends, executed after the Easter Rising of 1916, the tone is melancholy rather than hostile. His famous Lament for Thomas Macdonagh, reflects this:
He shall not hear the
bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he
is lain
Nor the voices of the
sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.
Ledwidge himself was deeply changed by the war and his experience of it. On his last leave he told his brother Joe - my grandfather - that he would not choose to fight now, even if the Germans were coming over the garden wall. Nevertheless he returned to Flanders, where he was to die. His poetic voice, however, appeared largely untouched by the conflict. It remained largely pastoral. He still sang of the hills and fields of Meath, and while his style became more polished, essentially his themes and tones retained a continuity.
On occasion, though, Ledwidge the soldier spoke:
A keen edged sword, a
soldier's heart
Is greater than a poet's art
And greater than a
poet's fame
A little grave without a name
Whence honour turns away
in shame.
By contrast, the war had deeply affected Hedd Wynn's poetic style, with his former pastoral and romantic tone replaced by pain and anger:
I sang to the long
hope of my life
And the magic of the
aspiration of youth:
The passion of the wind
and the scent
Of the lightning of the path
Ahead were in my poem.
My muse was a deep cry
And all the ages to come
will hear it,
And my rewards were
grievous violence;
And a world that is
One long bare winter
without respite. . .
Hedd Wynn was just six months older than Ledwidge. Both were 29 when they were killed on the same day, July 31st, 1917. Ledwidge was blown to pieces by a random shell, dying as he had so often lived, while building a road. Hedd Wynn was struck by shrapnel in a failed attack on German trenches. His last words were spoken in his second language, English: "I am very happy". It is likely that the two poets died within a few hundred yards of each other. They almost certainly never met in life. Some 800,000 first world War soldiers of the British Army, including perhaps 50,000 Irishmen, lie in France and Belgium in hundreds of cemeteries. Now the peasant poets of Wales and Ireland, similar in age, killed in the same battle on the same day lie 30 yards apart in the tiny cemetery of Artillery Wood.
Seamus Heaney's poem suggests that Ledwidge and the fallen Irish like him "consort underground" with the "true blue ones". Neither Hedd Wynn nor Francis Ledwidge, the two lost Celtic peasant poets of the Great War, was "true blue" . But one cannot help feeling that if they had to be left in Flanders Fields, it is each other's company they would have chosen.