INTRODUCTION TO SONGS OF THE FIELDS DUNSANY CASTLE, June, 1914. one who looked from a tower for a new star, watching for years the same part of the sky, suddenly saw it quite by chance while thinking of other things, and knew it for the star for which he had hoped, how many never care And the star might forests and seas, cheering millions of men would blaze over deserts and lost wanderers in desolate lands, or guiding dangerous quests millions would never know it. And a poet is no more than a star. If one has arisen where I have so long looked for one, amongst the Irish peasants, it can be little more than a secret that I shall share with those who read this book because they care for poetry. I have looked for a poet amongst the Irish peasants because it seemed to me that almost only amongst them there was in daily use a diction worthy of poetry, as well a an imagination capable of dealing with the great and simple things that are a poets wares. Their thoughts are in the spring-time, and all their metaphors fresh in London no one makes metaphors any more, but daily speech is strewn thickly with dead ones that their users should write upon paper and give to their gardeners to burn. In this same London, two years ago, where I was wasting June, I received a letter one day from Mr. Ledwidge and a very old copy-book. The letter asked whether there was any good in the verses that filled the copy-book, the produce apparently of four or five years. It began with a play in verse that no manager w rould dream of, there were mistakes in grammar, in spelling of course, and worse there were such phrases as thwart the rolling foam, waiting for my true love on the lea, etc., which are vulgarlyconsidered to be the appurtenances of poetry but out of these andmany similar errors there arose continually, like a mountain sheer out of marshes, that easy fluency of shapely lines which is now so noticeable in all that he writes that and sudden glimpses of the fields that he seems at times to bring so near to one that one exclaims, Why, that is how Meath looks or It is just like that along the Boyne in April quite taken by surprise by familiar things for none of us knows, till the poets point them out, how many beautiful things are close about us. Of pure poetry there are two kinds, that which mirrors the beauty of the world in which our bodies are, and that which builds the more mysterious kingdoms where geography ends and fairyland begins, with gods and heroes at war, and the sirens singing still, and Alph going down to the darkness from Xanadu. Mr. Ledwidge gives us the first kind. When they have read through the profounder poets, and seen the problem plays, and studied all the perplexities that puzzle man in the cities, the small circle of readers that I predict for him will turn to Ledwidge as to a mirror reflecting beautiful fields, as to a very still lake rather on a very cloudless evening. There is scarcely a smile of Spring or a sigh of Autumn that is not reflected here, scarcely a phase of the large benedictions of Summer even of Winter he gives us clear glimpses sometimes, albeit mournfully, remembering Spring. In the red west the twisted moon is low, And on the bubbles there are half-lit stars