To a Sparrow
Because you have no fear to mingle
Wings with those of greater part,
So like me, with song I single
Your sweet impudence of heart.
And when prouder feathers go where
Summer holds her leafy show,
You still come to us from nowhere
Like grey leaves across the snow.
In back ways where odd and end go
To your meals you drop down sure,
Knowing every broken window
Of the hospitable poor.
There is no bird half so harmless,
None so sweetly rude as you,
None so common and so charmless,
None of virtues nude as you.
But for all your faults I love you,
For you linger with us still,
Though the wintry winds reprove you
And the snow is on the hill.
Francis Ledwidge’s Lament for the Poets: 1916 was a poem of the week back in April 2009. The poets lamented there are the executed leaders of the Easter Rising, and I focused on the elegiac tone found in much of Ledwidge’s verse. But it’s also worth remembering his too-easily forgotten talent as an observer of the Irish countryside. As the poet Bernard O’Donoghue writes in his entry on Ledwidge in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry: – “It is sad that his nature poetry has not been discovered by Clare’s readership”.
To a Sparrow should certainly please an admirer of John Clare. It has both the bright earthiness of observation and the political edge. The latter is immediately apparent in the poet’s announcement of solidarity with the bird: “Because you have no fear to mingle / Wings with those of greater part, / So like me …” The internal half-rhyme (“song”/ “single”) dodges around the obvious verb, “sing” – which would be too fanciful for this poem and for this bird-call. Ledwidge can be fairly accused of poeticism in some of his writing. Here, his diction and images are firmly grounded.
Mocked by the self-sufficiency of the poet-sparrow, even summer is under suspicion; that “leafy show” she “holds” includes vanity as well as foliage. Un-personified, winter arrives in the poem quickly, casually. The sparrow, hanging on while other birds migrate, still comes “to us from nowhere / Like grey leaves across the snow”. This is a good simile, not about colour (sparrows are predominately brown, of course) but about unexpectedness. Long-fallen leaves, often grey or black, also suddenly appear from the ledges and crevices where they’ve been hidden, caught by a strong gust of wind and clearly visible on the white of snow-covered ground.
Now the sparrow comes nearer, busy and on home ground as it snatches its meals under the broken windows “of the hospitable poor”. The “poor” might be feeding scraps to the birds, but it’s more likely that Ledwidge intends irony: the “hospitality” is only a side effect of poverty and its disrepair.
The poet’s “sweet impudence” is apparent in the generally colloquial diction, but above all in his choice of double- or triple- word rhymes: “end go”/ “window”, “rude as you”/ “nude as you”. A joyful list of the sparrow’s faults in verse four is purposely unconvincing, especially when he repeats himself in “sweetly rude”.
Although clearly delighting in the bird’s ruffian ordinariness, Ledwidge concludes by celebrating a more serious quality, tenacity. This quality is a reminder of the harsh circumstances of the poet’s short life, including the service to political ideals that would contribute to his sacrifice and death in 1917, as an Irish Volunteer with the British Army.
• More of Ledwidge’s poetry can be read in this online collection.
