102 years after he died on the first day of the battle of Passchendaele Francis Ledwidge's words live on to ring out across world

Celebrated Irish poet Francis Ledwidge died 102 years ago today on the first day of the battle of Passchendaele. The writer and poet Dermot Bolger travelled to Flanders in 2017 to pay tribute at a remembrance ceremony. This is an edited version of his speech on the day

Francis Ledwidge, who was killed in 1917 at the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendaele. Photo: Culture Club

Dermot Bolger

In one sense, we are here to commemorate a tragedy from a century ago. The death of a lyric poet who lived by his labouring hands, cycling home from work as a farm hand or road labourer to write at a kitchen table, limbs weary but his mind enraptured by the possibilities of language.

Francis Ledwidge never saw his 30th birthday. He saw just one volume of his poems: it reached him while freezing on starvation rations in Serbia. A committed Irish nationalist, he never saw the independent Irish State he felt he was fighting for - represented here by the Irish ambassador to Belgium; by Mairead McGuinness, Vice President of the European Parliament and by the colour party of the Irish Army ex-servicemen holding aloft the tricolour and UN flag.