No visitor to the neolithic tombs of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange should miss out on a visit to the nearby Ledwidge Cottage.
The poet Francis Ledwidge was killed eight decades ago on July 31st, 1917, when a stray shell blew him to pieces during the building of a road near Ypres. Song of Peace, only his second published work, came out three months later and Last Songs, when it arrived, joined the earlier works in Complete Poems, edited by Ledwidge's mentor, Lord Dunsany.
Ledwidge was just short of his 30th birthday when he died. He had volunteered to fight, volunteered to forsake his tranquil homeland for a world of rotting corpses, bayonets and choking mustard gas.
For a long time we have associated him with romantic nationalism, his lament for the martyred Thomas McDonagh akin to Joseph Mary Plunkett's I see His Blood Upon the Rose or Padraig Pearse's Mise Eire. Yet in 1914 Ledwidge was an enlisted man; two years later he wore the same uniform as the men who pumped the bullets into McDonagh's body at Arbour Hill.
It would be a convenient dodge to see him as a naive dupe, coaxed by a dastardly Unionist peer into acting against his interests and wishes. But, as his biographer, Alice Curtayne, and Seamus Heaney, in his introduction to the 1992 edition of Selected Poems, have pointed out, it is a fallacy also to see him either as a flawless icon of 1916 or a willing pawn of a vain and snobbish aristocrat (who once, with typical condescension, described him as a "peasant").
Grocer's apprentice
Francis Ledwidge was born outside the village of Slane on August 19th, 1887, the second youngest in a family of four brothers and three sisters born to Anne and Patrick Ledwidge. He left school at 14 and his first recorded poem, Behind the Closed Eye, was written at the age of 16 while he was working as a grocer's apprentice in Rathfarnham.
He also worked the roads, the farms and the copper mine of Beauparc, where his involvement with trade union activities caused his dismissal for organising a strike against bad conditions.
His debut came when he sent his principal notebook of poems to Lord Dunsany, who immediately recognised the young man's potential. Ledwidge was introduced to the Dublin literary circle, connecting him with such writers as AE, James Stephens and Oliver St John Gogarty. His first volume of 50 poems, Songs of the Field, was not published until 1915, by which time he was immersed in the slaughter convulsing Serbia.
Frustrated love
The roots of his decision, on October 24th, 1914, to enlist in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers are complex. Ledwidge's personal life had been thrown into turmoil by his frustrated love for a local girl, Ellie Vaughey. Ellie's parents did not think him a suitable match for their daughter and married her off to a local farmer named John O'Neill.
Ledwidge's work, its heritage part Yeatsian, part Keatsian, was crafted against a rich tapestry of influences. The River Boyne, snaking through the rolling Meath hills, on whose bridge his commemorative plaque is placed, acted as a natural boundary between two island cultures: the Ascendancy, fey and rather decadent, living in its twilight time; the resurgent Gaels, celebrating the revival of their prehistoric heritage.
As a child, the backdrop to his world ranged from the neolithic tumuli of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth and the Celtic burial grounds of Rosnaree to Slane Castle and the Marquis of Conyngham's parklands. I wonder if such a world imprinted on the young poet's mind a sense of almost medieval chivalry, which added to his desire to set the loss of Ellie Vaughey into the wider, impersonal context of the Great War. If so, it is appropriate that he did not survive: the coming war would disband the European empires of medieval lineage just as surely as the next war spelt the end of the younger, global ones.
Ledwidge acted as a branch secretary for John Redmond's Irish Volunteers. When Redmond urged them to batten down "not only in Ireland itself, but wherever the firing line extends in defence of the rights of freedom and religion in this war", Ledwidge held out with those refusing to congratulate him. But talk of "rights of freedom and religion" might eventually mutate into "for God and Country" and the 1914-18 war causes one to wonder if the God was like some ancient Aztec deity, appeased only by ever more blood sacrifices.
Devastated by executions
Ledwidge, whose enlistment had nothing to do with Lord Dunsany, was devastated by the executions of the Easter Rising leaders. He drank more, reported late and was courtmartialled for making offensive remarks to a superior officer.
Even if his work deals only obliquely with war, it is significant that he is of the lost generation of the trenches, the young men born into a world whose permanence and security seemed absolute, but whose innocence died in the golden summer of 1914.
Today's Northern France has the languid tranquility of the Meath hills, but it is tempting to believe that somewhere, ghostly regiments are still marching to the Army brass. It seems almost flippant therefore, to add that our world, moving into a new century, is defined in its entirety by that obscene conflict. The Middle Ages ended in the trenches. Sweeping away the Romanovs, Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Ottomans, the maelstrom made Communism and Nazism possible; it heralded the end of what Professor Eric Hobsbawm calls "the long 19th century".
But it is almost gone from living memory. It disturbs me to think that the first World War will soon be as distant as the Crimean or Boer wars, and by that token, as sterile. I hope future readers find joy in Ledwidge's poems - joy that may help them appreciate his cruel and useless loss, 80 years ago.