“Once I found myself wondering if a cow that I knew to have a disease…” — Francis Ledwidge

“Once I found myself wondering if a cow that I knew to have a disease called ‘timber-tongue’ had really died.”

An oddly mundane memory arising in the middle of battle · Letter to Lord Dunsany, August 1915

About Francis Ledwidge

19 August 1887–31 July 1917

In the annals of Irish literature, few figures embody the tragic intersection of artistic promise and historical circumstance as poignantly as Francis Edward Ledwidge. Born into rural poverty in County Meath in 1887 and killed on a Belgian battlefield in 1917, Ledwidge's thirty years encompassed a meteoric rise from…

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