Poetry Codex

Modern

Francis Ledwidge

1887–1917

Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917) was an Irish poet, the son of a farm labourer from Slane, County Meath, who worked as a farmhand, miner and road worker. Lord Dunsany read his early verse, encouraged him and arranged the publication of Songs of the Fields (1915).

He enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, served at Gallipoli, in Serbia and in France, and wrote poems of the Irish countryside and of the war, including an elegy for Thomas MacDonagh. He was killed at Boezinge, near Ypres, on 31 July 1917.

Poems (59)

  1. Behind the Closed Eye
  2. To a Linnet in a Cage
  3. A Twilight in Middle March
  4. Spring
  5. Desire in Spring
  6. A Rainy Day in April
  7. The Broken Tryst
  8. Evening in May
  9. The Wife of Llew
  10. The Hills
  11. June
  12. In Manchester
  13. Music on Water
  14. In the Dusk
  15. August
  16. Before the Tears
  17. The Lost Ones
  18. A Song
  19. A Fear
  20. The Coming Poet
  21. Evening in February
  22. Low-Moon Land
  23. Growing Old
  24. After My Last Song
  25. A Little Boy in the Morning
  26. To a Distant One
  27. The Place
  28. May
  29. Crewbawn
  30. Evening in England
  31. Autumn Evening in Serbia
  32. Nocturne
  33. Spring and Autumn
  34. The Departure of Proserpine
  35. The Home-Coming of the Sheep
  36. My Mother
  37. To One Dead
  38. The Shadow People
  39. Thomas MacDonagh
  40. The Blackbirds
  41. The Lure
  42. Evening Clouds
  43. The Herons
  44. After
  45. A Dream Dance
  46. In September
  47. To a Sparrow
  48. Youth
  49. Autumn
  50. Ireland
  51. At a Poet's Grave
  52. Soliloquy
  53. The Dead Kings
  54. In France
  55. Fairies
  56. Pan
  57. A Fairy Hunt
  58. The Sylph
  59. Home

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