Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/77

Rh and fostered his genius and introduced his work to the world at large, in saying, 'I give my opinion that if Ledwidge had lived, this lover of all the seasons in which the blackbird sings would have surpassed even Burns, and Ireland would have lawfully claimed, as she may even yet, the greatest of peasant singers.'

The mental detachment that characterised Ledwidge, the readiness to escape in hours of leisure from his grim, abnormal surroundings into an atmosphere that was native to him, characterises the verse in Wyndham Tennant's one small volume, Worple Flit and Other Poems. A lieutenant of the Grenadiers, he fell in battle on the Somme at the age of nineteen—one year older than Chatterton. He passed the proofs of his book on the eve of the attack in which he was to die, and finished a last letter that night to his mother, Lady Glenconner, with the quotation that he uses on his title page:

He had so literally lisped in numbers that