Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory, Cannongate

This year I have noticed that several of my contacts on social media have used the phrase ‘Lest We Forget’ as part of their remembrance practices in advance of Armistice Day.  I’m not sure if this is a new trend or if I am just more aware of it this year. As this year’s definitely more vociferous debates over the politicization of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance indicate, the words and symbols through which we commemorate wars and their legacies are nothing if not mutable across time, responding to changing social and political contexts. As someone who wears a poppy to commemorate the disabled men for whom the manufacture of poppies formed their employment in war’s aftermath as much as the men who died in the war, the multiple meanings of any given object or phrase in relation to this emotive subject have always been a source of fascination.

At the same time, I know that this particular phrase has an association with Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday because I am aware the my emotions in encountering it in this context are familiar. Once again, I am struck by the oddity of the use of this phrase outside the wider context of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’, the poem with which it is so strongly associated. My awareness of the phrase’s ubiquity this year sent me back to that poem, written not to commemorate wars but Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. And for many reasons the 120-year-old poem struck me as more apposite than ever, in ways far beyond those the poet could ever have envisioned.  Today it seems to me worth quoting in full:

(1897)