by Sean McCabe
It’s hard to believe the Christmas season is upon us again, and that it’s almost time to wrap up 2011. Feels like 2011 only just got into its swing. And don’t we say this every year when we find ourselves into December all of a sudden? And don’t we follow this with the remark: ‘where did all the years go...?’
Around this time, for some reason, I usually find myself thinking about Francis Ledwidge, the poet from Meath who was killed in the trenches in France towards the end of World War One at the age of twenty-nine. Not that he had any outstanding Christmas poems (that I know of anyway), but because he is the poet from home, my part of the world; and home always has that deeper resonance in our minds around Christmas, whether in fact we happen to be at home or not. Home has an extra mystical feel to it around Christmas time.
Ledwidge was Ireland’s romantic poet, cut off as he was entering his prime, and known to the public now as the poet who would have been great had he lived. The Ledwidge Cottage, in which he grew up, just outside Slane in Meath, is now a museum. It shows, if you walk into it, his humble origins; for he was the son of a labourer, and the eighth of nine children. Much of his poetry describes the landscape around Slane; he is a poet of the fields, a true lover of nature, and had he lived, he would have been more or less a contemporary of Patrick Kavanagh, who is now regarded by many as Ireland’s national poet, and the ultimate voice of the Irish people...
Maybe the two poets would have been drinking buddies in the pubs of Dublin, as well as being rival scribes! Ledwidge’s poetry shows that he possessed a talent that would probably have equaled Kavanagh’s. Why the winds of genius should have alighted on these two individuals, both of them from obscure, small-farming backgrounds, is of course a mystery; and why one should be cut off so young, before having a chance to fulfill his promise, a tragedy; but what we have we have, and it’s something to be glad for:
Lost like a wind within a
summer wood,
From little knowledge where great sorrows brood
There are plenty of woods around Meath that are beautiful in the summertime, and which invite the casual walker to lose himself in. They don’t call Meath ‘The Royal County’ for nothing. And although this line speaks of ‘summer wood,’ it always comes to my mind around Christmas time. It’s the home thing. Christmas brings out the poetry in all of us.
Is there a reader reading this who is not reminded of the works of a well known poet from his or her own locality, when Christmas comes round? And this, regardless of the time of year that poet tends to highlight in his verse?
Maybe someone in New England thinks of Robert Frost, as he or she goes out for a walk in the woods of a winter evening:
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow
This poem certainly has a Christmasy feel to it; and reminds us again, that, as Tip O’Neill once said about politics, all poetry tends to be local. We should cherish our local poets. Sprung from the same soil, they certainly express what we feel, but haven’t the words ourselves for. Or as Alexander Pope more eloquently put it, a poet captures:
what oft was thought but n’er so well express’d
Much as I love Shakespeare, or John Donne, or T.S. Eliot, if I want that home feeling, at any time of the year, not just at Christmas, I will go to Ledwidge for a taste of that landscape that I hail from. Nothing beats the home cooking.
We all have our own Christmas associations, and isn’t it interesting how one thing leads to another, once we get going! It’s only after I think of Ledwidge that I start picturing in my mind frosty gardens, grey skies, a star in the east shining underneath those skies of grey and way in the distance at the top of some fields the outline of an evergreen tree; one that would look well in our front room, with Christmas decorations on it, and presents around it.
Yes Christmas is here again. And we know that this one will be at least as good as last year’s, if not better…
*Born in Co. Meath, Sean has been singing in pubs and at festivals across the US for ten years. His first book, A Good Deed & Other Stories, was published in 2009. He has a new novel out, set in Ireland: The Days. See www.mccabesband.com. Email Sean at
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