The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 20: TO FRANCIS LEDWIDGE

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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

TO FRANCIS LEDWIDGE

(Killed in action, July 31, 1917)

Beauty’s boy-servant, far in Flanders dead,

There shoots across the sea a shaft of pain

To think you are gone—a memory garlanded

With wilding flowers plucked in an Irish lane.

Your songs were like sweet waters to the throat,

Or tenderness and freshness of young leaves;

Surely the blackbird checks his laughing note,

And for your loss the dripping rainbow grieves.

With Brooke you are gone, with Grenfell, on high ways

Lost to our sense, beyond the chance of wrong;

Singers fall silent in these thunderous days,

But their bright death is radiance and a song.

—God send kind sleep to those clear Irish eyes

That saw the old earth still dewy with surprise!