Rhyme- Julian Perry

There's the girl who clips your ticket for the train,               A

  And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,           B

There's the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,             A

  And the girl who calls for orders at your door.                    B

      Strong, sensible, and fit,                                                       C

      They're out to show their grit,                                             C

    And tackle jobs with energy and knack.                              D

      No longer caged and penned up,                                        E

      They're going to keep their end up                                     E

    Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.              D

There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van,                      F

  There's the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,     G

There's the girl who cries 'All fares, please!' like a man,      F

  And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.                       G

      Beneath each uniform                                                           H

      Beats a heart that's soft and warm,                                    H

    Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;              D

      But a solemn statement this is,                                           I

      They've no time for love and kisses                                    I

    Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back.             D

War Girls, with a rhyme scheme of ABABCCDEEDFGFGHHDIID, has a deeply cultural theme that benefits from this rhyming. Separated into two halves, the poem mirrors this structure with an identical rhyming pattern for each half, balancing out and bringing the poem full circle by its end. Ending each half with the same line, "Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back," the rhyme stays the same. "Knack" and "back," as well as "lack" and back," create a repetition that emphasizes the most important lines within War Girls. Thematically, Jessie Pope pushes the idea that women can be and are often active in the war effort. Women in the early 1900s weren't normally considered fit to work, in nearly every sense, but Pope is attempting to highlight the many roles women did play during wartime. These women will do their jobs "till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back," working just as long as their male counterparts. The fact that this line is repeatedly used in rhymes, with DEED and DIID, allows the reader's attention to stay with Pope's central idea in this line.

Pope, Jessie. "War Girls." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 09 Oct. 2014. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/248382>.