Robert W. Service 
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man 

This is definitely a book of its time. It is poetry about World War I, back when it was simply the Great War. It was written at a time when poetry was meant to be enjoyable to read, with meter, rhyme, and alliteration making the lines trip off the tongue. Service does this well, but some of his poems use dialect which is difficult to decipher (e.g., ”ave yer bay’nit ready’). The themes of the poem deal with war’s suffering, its glory, its impact on soldiers and survivors. The poems extolling how virtuous it is to go to war sound ironic to my ears, but as I said, it is a book of its time. 

Simultaneously beautiful and sad poems that depicts both the best attributes of men and the worst of experiences during World War I.

Robert William Service (January 16, 1874 – September 11, 1958) was a British-Canadian poet and writer who has often been called ‘the Bard of the Yukon’. He is best known for his poems ‘The Shooting of Dan Mc Grew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam Mc Gee’, from his first book, Songs of a Sourdough (1907; also published as The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses). His vivid descriptions of the Yukon and its people made it seem that he was a veteran of the Klondike gold rush, instead of the late-arriving bank clerk he actually was. ‘These humorous tales in verse were considered doggerel by the literary set, yet remain extremely popular to this day.’