Francis Ledwidge: Poems

There have been three different editions of Francis Ledwidge’s poems titled The Complete Poems. None is complete. This selection, Poems, the first book of Ledwidge’s poems published in County Meath, is based largely on the first of them published by Herbert Jenkins Ltd (London) in 1919 with introductions by Lord Dunsany and comprising Songs of the Fields (the one collection the author saw in his lifetime), Songs of Peace (the collection being printed at the time of his death) and Last Songs (a selection assembled by Dunsany, the author’s mentor and patron). That collection was clearly closest to the poet’s approval and enjoyed his patron’s endorsement. To those three sections I have added ‘Other Poems’, a selection drawing in the main on Alice Curtayne’s pioneering scholarship and including work generously provided by Joe Doyle from the archives of Dunsany Castle. — Peter Fallon, from the Editor's Preface

In Belgium, days or weeks before his death on 31 July 1917, Francis Ledwidge wrote these lines about the fields of County Meath in a poem called simply ‘Home’. For Seamus Heaney he ‘can be counted as a “war poet” in the company of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon’. In his Introduction to Last Songs (1918), his patron, the 18th Lord Dunsany, wrote, ‘He has left behind him verses of great beauty, simple rural lyrics that may be something of an anodyne for this stricken age.