david goldie
‘O lang and lang I’ve lookit doon
Onbonnie, dirty Dundee toon,
And seen i’ Council knave and clown,
But sic a crew
O’ rowdy, rantin’, roarin’ fellows—
Sae scant o’ sense, sae sound o’ bellows—
I never knew.’^22This expansive, extroverted attitude persists in some of the poems in Lee’s war
writing, as does some of his earlier McGonagallesque awkwardness.^23 But more
characteristic, especially of the better work like ‘The Green Grass’, is a directness
and simplicity of diction that is largely absent from his pre-war writing:
The dead spake together last night,
And one to the other said:
‘Why are we dead?’
They turned them face to face about
In the place where they were laid;
‘Whyarewedead?’
‘This is the sweet, sweet month o’ May,
And the grass is green o’erhead—
Why are we dead?
The grass grows green on the long, long tracks
That I shall never tread—
Why are we dead?’^24Another new appearance in Lee’s war writing—as in Kipling’s—is the short,
Imagistic aphorism. One of several mordant examples of this is ‘The Bullet’, which
reads in its entirety:
Every bullet has its billet;
Many bullets more than one:
God! Perhaps I killed a mother
When I killed a mother’s son.^25The other salient fact about Lee’s war writing, visible in these examples, is its
movement away from Scots dialect. Lee had from the beginning, in common with
almost all Scottish writers of the time, tended to use a standard poetic English in
(^22) Joseph Lee, ‘The Waukrife Wyverns’, inPoems: Tales o’Our Town(Dundee: George Montgomery,
1910), 49.
(^23) See e.g. ‘Back to London: A Poem of Leave’: ‘But one short day since I had left|A land upheaved
and rent,|Where Spring brings back no bourgeoning,|As Nature’s force were spent;|Yet now I
travelled in a train|Through the kindly land of Kent!’ (Lee,Work-a-Day Warriors(London: John
Murray, 1917), 22). 24
Lee, ‘The Green Grass’, inBallads of Battle(London: John Murray, 1916), 22.
(^25) Lee, ‘The Bullet’, ibid. 21.