War Rhymes by Wayfarer — Background and Themes

Structures of Satire and Sorrow

The collection relies on two dominant verse forms: the limerick and the quatrain. The opening poem, Modern Diplomacy, or How the War Started, uses a chain of limericks to assign each nation a distinct voice and motive. Austria speaks in threats, Serbia in defiance, the Kaiser in bluster, and Italy in cautious self-interest. The form itself becomes a commentary—the war reduced to a series of petty squabbles. Later poems shift to more solemn quatrains, as in Afterwards, where the rhyme scheme tightens into ABAB and the tone turns reflective. This structural pivot mirrors the collection's movement from the absurdity of pre-war diplomacy to the sober reckoning with loss. Cosens also experiments with dialogue poems, such as Trouble in the Trenches, where soldiers' complaints are voiced in a rapid, rhyming exchange that mimics the chaos of the front.

Recurring Images of Decay and Disillusion

Throughout the collection, images of rot, stench, and cheapening goods recur. In German Securities Fall, the fall of the German line is matched by the spoiling of sauerkraut, limburger, liverwurst, and lager beer—a comic deflation of military victory into culinary disgust. The same imagery appears in the trenches: soldiers complain of 'stenches,' 'vermin,' and cheese 'no hungry rat would eat.' This sensory vocabulary links the physical degradation of war with moral decay. Cosens also returns to the figure of the profiteer and the 'slacker' nation. The United States is portrayed in the opening limerick as a farmer too busy with domestic troubles to intervene, and later poems criticize those who 'cravenly study / The getting of guerdons and gain.' The repeated contrast between sacrifice and selfishness gives the collection a persistent moral edge.

Movement Between Home Front and Battlefront

Cosens shifts scenes rapidly, often within a single poem. Modern Diplomacy jumps from Vienna to Belgrade to Berlin to London, compressing geography into a series of stanzas. Later poems move from the trenches to the home front, as in the section on 'the ceaseless war work of our women' and the return of disabled soldiers. The foreword explicitly lists these transitions: from the outbreak of hostilities to the invasion of Belgium, from Canadian indifference to recruiting, from unemployment to the 'awful casualty lists.' This restless movement reflects the war's disruption of ordinary life. The reader is never allowed to settle in one place; the poems demand attention to multiple fronts simultaneously. The effect is cumulative: the war is not a single event but a network of experiences, each with its own rhythm and voice.

Voices of the Marginal and the Mundane

Cosens gives space to voices often absent from official war poetry. The limerick form allows each nation to speak in its own idiom, including a broad rendering of dialect for John Bull and a folksy drawl for Uncle Sam. In Trouble in the Trenches, the soldiers' complaints are rendered in a comic litany of ailments—cough, itch, lumbago, spavin—that undercuts any heroic narrative. The poem ends with desertion, a stark admission of failure. Elsewhere, the collection includes a section on 'the Socialist' and 'the Anarchist,' who argue that the war will be in vain if it does not lead to social justice. These voices are not endorsed but presented as part of the spectrum of opinion. The foreword's disclaimer—that the reader is not expected to agree with everything—licenses this polyphony. Cosens does not flatten dissent into patriotism; he lets the contradictions stand.

Readers may find it useful to read the poems in the order they appear, noting how the mood darkens and the targets shift. The foreword provides a rough timeline, but the poems themselves often jump backward or forward in time. Pay attention to the dates given in some titles—they anchor the verse in specific moments of the war. The collection rewards attention to its formal variety: the same poet who writes a limerick about diplomacy also writes a quatrain about the cost of victory. That range is the book's real subject.

I found myself thinking of my grandfather’s worn khaki coat, and how War Rhymes lets that mud-soaked voice breathe again. Reading it, I remembered the quiet ache in The Placid Pug, and Other Rhymes — Text and Context, where the absurd and the sorrowful sit side by side. Both books hold that strange, human flicker—finding words when the world goes quiet.