Ballyhaunis Cemetery

Two extra pix from the cemetery.

This is a poem written by an Irish corporal in the British army, Francis Ledwidge, while home on leave in 1916, a Lament for Thomas MacDonagh, a close friend and fellow Irish poet about to be executed by a British army firing squad for his participation in the Easter Rising. It’s the sort of short poem school children learn to recite, featuring the dark cow of foreboding and death and the pleasant mead(ows) of the next life. It is considered one of the best poems of the English language and is part of funerary traditions quite aside from military honors.

Another tradition, but outside the walls enclosing the consecrated ground of a cemetery, a burial site and memorial for children of the parish who died before the could be baptised.