Francis Ledwidge’s “August” is deceptively simple: a short lyric about waiting for a woman in a hayfield. Ledwidge was an Irish poet from County Meath, a farm laborer’s son who knew the rhythms of haymaking and harvest firsthand. Published in his first collection, Songs of the Fields, in 1915, as Europe was already at war, the poem carries the rural music of his home landscape, but also an undercurrent of something more unsettling. The woman he waits for is not just a lover; she is the month itself—beautiful, strong, and carrying a blade.
Each seven-line stanza moves with a lulling iambic rhythm, as if echoing a folk song or a walking pace across a field. The rhyme scheme is strange and hypnotic: the first four lines alternate, then the fifth and sixth pull together in the same rhyme as the first, before the seventh line returns to the second. That final return creates a feeling of a circle closing, or a breath being let out. The speaker never says “she is coming now”; everything is in the future tense—she’ll come, she shall be beautiful, I’ll know her. The effect is prophetic, as though the speaker is describing a dream that has not yet arrived.
The imagery is lush and physical. “White over yellow harvest’s song” places her above the ripe crop, pale against the gold, while “her dewy rainbow way” gives her a path of morning light and water. The sun is called “the lidless eye of noon,” a phrase that turns warmth into something unblinking and watchful. It “spray[s] tan” on her ankles and “kiss[es] her brown the whole day long,” blending tenderness with exposure. The speaker knows her in the windrows, the cut rows of hay, where she stands “tall / Above the crickets.” He knows her most intimately by her odd eyes: “One May-blue, one November-grey.” That single detail cracks the idyll open. The pairing of May-blue and November-grey turns her gaze into a calendar: one eye looking back toward spring, the other already facing the fall.
The poem’s quiet turn comes in the last three lines. Watching from “the red barn wall,” the speaker sees her take down a rusty scythe. The adjective “rusty” matters: the blade is not gleaming or heroic; it is worn, perhaps neglected, as if time itself has begun to tarnish it. She calls, and the speaker says, “And I will follow her away.” The poem never says where “away” is. That openness is the source of its power. What began as a love lyric to summer ends as a meditation on being led toward the cut, the end of the season, perhaps the end of life. Ledwidge—who would be killed at Passchendaele in 1917—may not have built the poem around the trenches, but his own death now hangs over that final line. What makes “August” linger is its refusal to separate beauty from mortality; it makes the harvest a woman worth following, even while she carries the scythe.