author
Francis Ledwidge
1887–1917
Raised in rural County Meath and largely self-educated, this Irish poet wrote with unusual tenderness about birds, fields, love, and home. His life was cut short in World War I, giving his work an added sense of poignancy.
1 Audiobook
The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge with Introductions by Lord Dunsany
by Francis Ledwidge
About the author
Born in Slane, County Meath, in 1887, Francis Ledwidge grew up in a poor family and left school young, but he kept educating himself while working a series of laboring jobs. That mix of hard experience and close attention to the natural world helped shape the direct, musical style that made him one of Ireland's best-loved early 20th-century poets.
Ledwidge became associated with the Irish literary revival, and the writer Lord Dunsany helped bring his work to a wider audience. His first collection, Songs of the Fields, appeared in 1915, and his poems became known for their warmth, lyric beauty, and deep feeling for the Irish countryside. He is still often remembered as the "poet of the blackbirds."
He served as a soldier in World War I and was killed in 1917 near Ypres, in Belgium, at not yet thirty years old. That brief life gives his poems a special emotional force: they can feel peaceful and sorrowful at once, full of love for ordinary places and an awareness of how fragile life is.