Hedd Wyn and Francis Ledwidge, both poets, both unwilling combatants in a conflict that took so many lives, both observers of the horror of war.
Why must I live in this grim age
When, to a far horizon, God
Has ebbed away, and man, with rage
Now wields the sceptre and the rod?
Man raised his sword, once God had gone,
To slay his brother, and the roar
Of battlefields now casts upon
Our homes the shadow of the war.
The harps to which we sang are hung
On willow boughs, and their refrain
Drowned by the anguish of the young
Whose blood is mingled with the rain.
— Hedd Wyn (Translation by Alan Llwyd)
July 31, 1917 was a day like many others on the Western front; a day on which many more young men died.
A massive Allied offensive had begun near the Belgian town of Ypres. Millions of shells combined with torrential rain had, in one description, “turned the battlefield into a swampy pulverized mire dotted with water-filled craters deep enough to drown a man, all made worse by the churned-up graves of soldiers killed in earlier fighting.”
Amongst the countless young volunteers and conscripts who died in Flanders on this day, two young men from either side of the Irish sea – two rural youths – left a legacy of poetry infused with a pastoral longing for the green field and ancient story of home, and became a symbol of a lost generation devoured by the despoiling insanity of industrialised war.
From Slane in Co. Meath, Francis Ledwidge was an unwilling volunteer, who reluctantly joined so that Irish manhood would not be shamed.
In his own words he said: “I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing but pass resolutions”.
In Snowdonia, in Wales, Ellis Evans, better known by his Bardic name Hedd Wyn, which means blessed peace, joined to save his younger brother from the duty of enlisting.
Both Ledwidge and Evans were killed on the same day on the same gruesome front. Their lives ended in a landscape transformed from the idyllic rural patchwork beloved of the two poets, to a pock-gashed and weeping landscape reeking of pestilent death.
Like Ledwidge, Hedd Wyn did not rush to enlist when war was declared on Germany. The eldest of 14, he was a committed Christian pacifist, and in his poetry the effect of the war can be clearly felt.
Here we get a sense of the depleted households of missing sons who had strode to defend “the cause” never to return.
A translated part of his most famous poem, Yr Arwr (“The Hero” – all his poetry was in Welsh) witnesses this awful premonition.
“I knew I saw my own young man – setting out
From old blessed walls of his fathers.
I saw the youth retreating through the darkness
To a magical leaf trace of green Eldorado,
At his leaving the trees cried, – and streams
Sighed in an unhappy haze”
(–Translated by Len Shurey of Caerphilly)
He wrote these lines in a brief reprieve given to farmers’ sons who were needed for the harvest.
In 1916 conscription was enacted and the Evans family were commanded to send one of their sons to war. Being the eldest and deemed necessary to work the family farm, Ellis was exempt, and so the command was passed to his younger brother Robert, who Ellis loved dearly.
Ellis volunteered to go in place of his younger brother, and so he enlisted in 1916.
In March 1917, he was allowed a short period of leave to help with the plowing and planting on the family farm, but his father had other ideas for him, for he knew that Hedd Wyn was working on a poem for the Eisteddfod and so he commanded him back to the farm house to finish his work while the family worked the fields.
The Eisteddfod is a massive annual gathering of Welsh speakers focusing on Welsh culture and literature, the centre-piece of which is the announcement of the winner of the Chair for poetry.
This is awarded before the great hall where the Nom-de-Plume of the winning poet is announced three times by the ‘Archdruid’ of the festival. The archdruid stands besides the Bardic chair and announces the winning poet’s name once to the left side of the hall, to the centre, and to the right side, before the winner reveals himself and takes his place on the Bardic Chair.
1917 became known as the ‘Eisteddfod y Gadair Ddu’ – the Eisteddfod of the Black Chair. For when the name of Hedd Wyn had been called three times nobody came to the chair.
The prime minister of England, Lloyd George (admittedly, no friend of Ireland or the cause that Ledwidge held dear), came through the crowd and from the stage announced that Hedd Wyn had been killed six weeks earlier at Passchendaele. A black shroud was draped over the empty chair.
It was the time of harvest, and back in Evans family farm the crop that had been planted whilst Hedd Wyn was sent to compose his words, was being gathered in.
On the banks of the Boyne, the harvest was also bowing before the scythe, and all that remained of Francis Ledwidge were his words.
“And I, too, told the kings a story
Of later glory, her fourth sorrow:
There was a sound like moving shields
In high green fields and the lowland furrow.”
And one said: ‘Since the poets perished
And all they cherished in the way,
Their thoughts unsung, like petal showers
Inflame the hours of blue and grey.’
And one said: ‘A loud tramp of men
We’ll hear again at Rosnaree.’
A bomb burst near me where I lay.
I woke, ’twas day in Picardy.
He wrote these words in the trenches behind the lines in Ypres just weeks before his death. Probably at the same time as Hedd Wyn wrote his elegiac piece.
It was a time of build up, of preparation for the great assault which began on July 31st. It was a time of sowing.
(Photo https://www.westernfrontassociation.com)
Photo: Liam Ó Broin, sculptor
Lorcán Mac Mathúna is a seannós singer, and a composer and producer.