First
World War soldier Joseph Lee has been called Scotland’s Forgotten War Poet. Although he was nearly
40 years-old when war was declared, Lee joined to fight with the Royal
Highlanders and King’s Royal Rifle Corps until he was captured as a German
prisoner of war in 1917. “The Black Watch Poet of Dundee” was one of the more
popular soldier-poets during the war, and Lee published two volumes of poetry,
accompanied by his own illustrations. His
sober meditation on the coming of the new year appears in his second volume, Work-a-day Warriors (1917).
The
Return O’ the Year
Year
after year the grass,
Year after year the grain,
But
the sleeping dead in their lonely graves
Year
after year the bud,
And the bird upon the tree,
But
my fond love wha sleeps so sound,
He never comes back to me.
Year after year the wind,
Year after year the rain,
But
the weary night and the dreary day
Bring nought to me but pain.
The
sun and the moon and the stars,
And the clouds fade from the sky,
And
the last leaves fall from the lifeless trees—
It’s O, that I might die!
Year
after year the grass,
Year after year the grain,
But
the dead who sleep in the weary graves
They never
return again.
—Joseph Lee*
A reviewer from
the Spectator said of Lee’s first war
poetry collection, “Of the verse that has come straight from the trenches, the
Ballads of Battle by Lance-Corporal
Joseph Lee, of the Black Watch, are among the very best … The horror, the
exultation, the weariness, and the humour of trench warfare are here ...
Corporal Lee’s spirited sketches and portraits add greatly to the
attractiveness of this little volume which is dedicated to the comrades in arms
so faithfully and affectionately portrayed in his verse.”*
Lee survived the
war, returning to his work as a journalist. He died in Dundee in 1949.
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* All sketches are from Lee's collection Work-a-day Warriors.
**”Books: War-Time Poems,” Supplement to the Spectator, 7 Oct.
1916, p. 391.
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