Francis Ledwidge,[1] as a poet, is the complement of Sorley; each brings us what the other lacks. Ledwidge has no constructive power, and the impetus of his cadences rarely carries him satisfactorily through even a short poem, whereas Sorley's rode on unchecked by weak lines and poor phrasing. Our new poet's language is, on the other hand, often over-poetical, and his images sometimes fantastically dazzling—an excess of the quality which critics perceive most easily and welcome most widely! And a vivid coloured flash on its surface is an important element in great verse. Lord Dunsany, who introduces Ledwidge to the public, tells us that he was born a peasant in Meath and tried once to assist a Dublin grocer. But cities cannot cage these wild souls, home memories inveigle, the country lures,
"And wondrous impudently sweet,
Half of him passion, half conceit,
The blackbird calls adown the street
Like the piper of Hamelin."
And the lad of sixteen who had written this "walked home one night a distance of thirty miles."
Since the war he had become a corporal in the regiment in which Lord Dunsany was a captain, and had travelled to Greece and Egypt. This preface likens him to John Clare, our English pauper poet, of one hundred years ago, whose life among a nation of shopkeepers is the saddest idyll; and even to-day I fancy that Ledwidge might have been congratulated on his birth the other side of St George's Channel, among people more patient with and more appreciative of poets. John Clare's poems were a
- ↑ Songs of the Fields. By Francis Ledwidge. Herbert Jenkins. 1915. Songs of Peace. By Francis Ledwidge. Herbert Jenkins. 1917. Quotations by permission of Herbert Jenkins, Esq., and Lord Dunsany.
