Explore "To Francis Ledwidge" by Helen Gray Cone on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MOODS OF WAR
(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!