Enigmas of the Great War: Thomas Kettle and Francis Ledwidge

Abstract

Recent publications in the field of Irish Studies have begun to address the previously neglected issue of Irish involvement in the First World War, including some limited attention to Irish First World War literature. This article explores the poetry of two nationalist writers who joined the British army, namely Thomas Kettle and Francis Ledwidge. Kettle was a public figure who had served as a Westminster MP and his poetry expresses the political complexity of his responses to the outbreak of war and to the Easter Rising. Ledwidge was first and foremost a poet and the article explores and evaluates that aspect of his oeuvre which can be described as war poetry.

Keywords:

• Thomas Kettle
• Francis Ledwidge
• First World War
• nationalism
• Easter Rising
• poetry

Notes

 1. Heaney, Field Work, 59–60; J.B. Lyons, Enigma of Tom Kettle.

 2. Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War.

 3. Haughey, The First World War in Irish Poetry.

 4. See Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry, 84–5 for a survey of inclusions and exclusions of Graves in criticism and anthologies of Irish literature.

 5. Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge, 164.

 6. Some contemporary reviews, however, value the poems surprisingly highly, possibly influenced by the writer's early death. An article in the Daily News, for example, states that ‘Some of them rank in the extraordinary slender stock of war poetry which deserves and may have attained immortality’ (Daily News, 3 February 1917). The Weekly Freeman in a review of Poems and Parodies comments: ‘while the works of some of his contemporaries possess a more delicate bloom, he comes nearer to the ideal of Mr Yeats’ (Weekly Freeman, n.d.); while the Westminster Gazette speaks of ‘a poet of no mean ability’ (Westminster Gazette, 3 March 1917) (all in LA34/1, Kettle Papers, UCD).

 7. Devine, ‘Introduction’, ix–xi.

 8. Kettle, ‘Young Egypt’, in The Day's Burden, 73–6.

 9. Lyons, Enigma of Tom Kettle, 139. By ‘advanced nationalist’ I follow Ben Novick, Keith Jeffery and Senia Pašeta in using the term to embrace a spectrum of nationalist opinion favouring a greater separation from Britain than that offered by Home Rule (see Novick, Conceiving Revolution, 15, n. 2).

10. Freeman's Journal, 1 April 1912, quoted in Lyons, Enigma of Tom Kettle, 210.

11. Kettle, Ways of War, 72.

12. Kettle, Poems and Parodies, 76.

13. Tressell, Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

14. Pašeta, ‘Thomas Kettle’, in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, 24.

15. Kettle, Day's Burden, xii.

16. Daily News, 12 September, 1914 (LA34/1, Kettle Papers, UCD).

17. Gwynn and Kettle, Battle Songs for the Irish Brigades .

18. Strachan, The First World War, vol. 1, 1118.

19. Keegan, The First World War, 91–2.

20. For an extended discussion of atrocity stories as a subgenre, see Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War, 43–50.

21. Novick, Conceiving Revolution, 90.

22. UCD, LA34/394(1), T.M. Kettle, draft notes, quoted in Pašeta, ‘Thomas Kettle’, in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, 15.

23. This poem appears in Battle Songs of the Irish Brigades under the title ‘The Last Crusade: A Song of the Irish Armies’ with ‘trump’ instead of ‘tramp’.

24. Fran Brearton compares the attitudes of Pearse and Brooke, quoting Pearse: ‘[B]loodshed is a cleansing and satisfying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood’ (Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry, 17). One might also cite Edmund Gosse in the Edinburgh Review: ‘War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect’ (qtd by Samuel Hynes in A War Imagined, 12).

25. Letter to H. McLaughlin, 7 August, 1916 (LA34/397, Kettle Papers, UCD).

26. One of the fullest accounts of this incident is to be found in Gibbon, Inglorious Soldier. Gibbon witnessed most of the events surrounding the murder and heard the shots which killed Sheehy Skeffington.

27. Tynan, Years of the Shadow, 81.

28. Maume, Long Gestation, 185.

29. O'Meara, Francis Ledwidge.

30. Heaney, ‘Introduction’, 20.

31. O'Meara, Lantern on the Wave, 41–4.

32. Quoted in Powell, Deep Cry, 282.

33. For a discussion of the tendency to view First World War soldiers as victims rather than combatants see Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined, 215.

34. Curtayne, Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge, 153. Except where indicated, my quotations are from this edition, indicated as Complete Poems in the body of the text.

35. Sassoon, Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 535–41.

36. Tynan, Years of the Shadow, 291–2.

37. See ‘The Old Gods’ (Complete Poems, 251) with its reference to ‘So far from Æ's little room.’

38. For a discussion of the literariness of many war poets' treatment of the English landscape, see Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 235–69.

39. Tynan, Years of the Shadow, 289.

40. Tynan, Years of the Shadow, 290.

41. Tynan, Years of the Shadow, 294.

42. Graham, Deconstructing Ireland, 93.