INTRODUCTION TO SONGS OF THE FIELDS DUNSANY CASTLE, June, 1914. one
who looked from a tower for a new star, watching for years the same
part of the sky, suddenly saw it quite by chance while thinking of
other things, and knew it for the star for which he had hoped, how
many never care And the star might forests and seas, cheering
millions of men would blaze over deserts and lost wanderers in
desolate lands, or guiding dangerous quests millions would never
know it. And a poet is no more than a star. If one has arisen where
I have so long looked for one, amongst the Irish peasants, it can
be little more than a secret that I shall share with those who read
this book because they care for poetry. I have looked for a poet
amongst the Irish peasants because it seemed to me that almost only
amongst them there was in daily use a diction worthy of poetry, as
well a an imagination capable of dealing with the great and simple
things that are a poets wares. Their thoughts are in the
spring-time, and all their metaphors fresh in London no one makes
metaphors any more, but daily speech is strewn thickly with dead
ones that their users should write upon paper and give to their
gardeners to burn. In this same London, two years ago, where I was
wasting June, I received a letter one day from Mr. Ledwidge and a
very old copy-book. The letter asked whether there was any good in
the verses that filled the copy-book, the produce apparently of
four or five years. It began with a play in verse that no manager w
rould dream of, there were mistakes in grammar, in spelling of
course, and worse there were such phrases as thwart the rolling
foam, waiting for my true love on the lea, etc., which are
vulgarlyconsidered to be the appurtenances of poetry but out of
these andmany similar errors there arose continually, like a
mountain sheer out of marshes, that easy fluency of shapely lines
which is now so noticeable in all that he writes that and sudden
glimpses of the fields that he seems at times to bring so near to
one that one exclaims, Why, that is how Meath looks or It is just
like that along the Boyne in April quite taken by surprise by
familiar things for none of us knows, till the poets point them
out, how many beautiful things are close about us. Of pure poetry
there are two kinds, that which mirrors the beauty of the world in
which our bodies are, and that which builds the more mysterious
kingdoms where geography ends and fairyland begins, with gods and
heroes at war, and the sirens singing still, and Alph going down to
the darkness from Xanadu. Mr. Ledwidge gives us the first kind.
When they have read through the profounder poets, and seen the
problem plays, and studied all the perplexities that puzzle man in
the cities, the small circle of readers that I predict for him will
turn to Ledwidge as to a mirror reflecting beautiful fields, as to
a very still lake rather on a very cloudless evening. There is
scarcely a smile of Spring or a sigh of Autumn that is not
reflected here, scarcely a phase of the large benedictions of
Summer even of Winter he gives us clear glimpses sometimes, albeit
mournfully, remembering Spring. In the red west the twisted moon is
low, And on the bubbles there are half-lit stars
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