Francis Ledwidge wrote “The Wife of Llew” as part of the Celtic Revival’s return to ancient myth for emotional and imaginative nourishment. Born in Slane, County Meath, in 1887, Ledwidge worked as a farm labourer and miner before Lord Dunsany encouraged his writing. His first collection, Songs of the Fields, was published in 1915 while he was serving in the British Army; he was killed near Ypres in 1917. The story behind the poem comes from the Welsh Mabinogion, in which the magicians Gwydion and Math fashion Blodeuwedd from blossoms as a wife for the hero Llew Llaw Gyffes.
The poem begins in mid-spell: “And Gwydion said to Math, when it was Spring.” That opening “And” settles readers inside a larger story, as though the season itself has just spoken. Together the two break “broad boughs yet moist with dew” and build a woman piece by sensory piece: a face of violet and meadow-sweet, feet of daisies, a mouth of poppy, a voice made by a singing linnet. The central idea is not simply the myth but the power of patient, musical making. Creation here is an act of voice and rhythm. The wife is literally composed of flowers and birdsong, and she comes to life only after the makers “chanted twenty hours.” In this way the poem quietly mirrors its own craft: the poet, too, arranges sounds into a living shape.
Ledwidge builds this spell in twelve lines of mostly iambic pentameter, though the syntax often feels like unhurried speech. The rhyme scheme shifts as if knotting different threads. The first four lines rhyme the outer “Spring” and “ring” around the inner “Llew” and “dew,” creating a closed circle like the “magic ring” they make in shadow. The next lines fall into couplets—“meadow-sweet” and “feet,” “wing” and “sing”—so the sound itself pairs body parts with music. The final four lines then alternate rhymes, “mouth” with “south” and “hours” with “flowers,” opening the poem outward as Llew carries the bride away. Alliteration intensifies the ritual feel: “broke broad boughs” imitates the snap of living wood, while “moist with dew” keeps the touch fresh and cool. Ledwidge’s imagery is boldly synaesthetic. A “wide poppy” becomes her mouth, and inside it a linnet sings, so that seeing the flower and hearing the bird happen at once. Her feet are “a mound of daisies on a wing,” as if she is already half airborne. The verb “chant” is crucial; the makers do not merely assemble, they “chanted twenty hours,” and Llew arrives “singing from the azure south.” Sound is the element that finally unites the pieces.
What makes the poem significant is how it treats myth not as a dead reference but as a live incantation. Published in 1915, it reached readers as Ledwidge was already at war, and its bright, mythic spring feels all the more poignant. An Irish poet draws on Welsh legend, celebrating a shared Celtic imagination rather than a narrow national one. Ledwidge, sometimes called the “poet of the blackbirds,” here creates a small, radiant defence of the imagination: a woman made from “birds and flowers,” borne away in song.