Return O' the Year

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

   They never return again.

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.