<<  -- 7 --  Roderic Dunnett    BEHIND THE LINES

While recovering from the trenches back home in 1916 Ledwidge heard of, and grieved for, the execution of his friend, the poet Thomas MacDonagh -- the more traumatic because his Dublin executioners wore the same uniform as Ledwidge himself. Ledwidge's elegy on MacDonagh :

He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain

features among the exhibition's manuscripts, alongside Seamus Heaney's poem In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge :

... I think of you in your Tommy's uniform,
A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,
Ghosting the trenches with a bloom of hawthorn
Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave ...

Each poet has a room, or half of one, dedicated to him. The Brooke display includes the score of a piece of music [listen -- Imperial War disc track 1, Elegy, 0:00-1:08], Elegy In Memoriam Rupert Brooke, inscribed 'Cape Helles 1915' and composed in his memory by the Australian, Frederic Septimus Kelly, who'd served with Brooke, and who was later killed at Beaucourt, during the Battle of the Ancre (the follow-up to the Somme offensive) on 13 November 1916. This haunting, and (in its simplicity) oddly prescient music can be heard playing softly [listen : Imperial War Disc track 1, Elegy, 5:50-6:47], as can some Ivor Gurney piano preludes and songs, while you explore the exhibition.

Both Kelly and another even more striking musician, the British song composer Denis Browne (1888-1915), who -- like George Butterworth (Pozières, 5 August 1916) and Ernest Farrar (Epéhy Ronssoy, 18km NE of Peronne towards Cambrai, 18 September 1918) -- was killed in the war during the assault on Atatürk's Achi Baba Heights on 4 June 1915, knew Brooke well.

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