Is this a propaganga WW1 Poem? not too sure myself..?

Question

Here are the 1st two stanzas:

What will you lack, sonny, what will you lack,

When the girls line up the street

Shouting their love to the lads to come back

From the foe they rushed to beat?

Will you send a strangled cheer to the sky

And grin till your cheeks are red?

But what will you lack when your mate goes by

With a girl who cuts you dead?

Where will you look, sonny, where will you look,

When your children yet to be

Clamour to learn of the part you took

In the War that kept men free?

Will you say it was naught to you if France

Stood up to her foe or bunked?

But where will you look when they give the glance

That tells you they know you funked?

byEdward Harold Begbie

if it is not propaganda then wht type of poem would you call it?

Also the questions the poem is asking e.g. line one, and 5, are the rheutorical?

thnx if u can answer this!

Answer 1

Yep it is,  

Coz it's like telling people how proud girls are of the ppl who come back and all tht

Answer 2

It is a propaganda poem because it threatens the reader with an ominous passage at the end:  if you fail ("funk"), you will have nowhere to turn your eyes but downward in shame, because you will not have succeeded in doing your duty.  The poem is government propaganda that attempted to urge young men to join up.

The questions asked in lines 1-4 and 5-6 are designed more to get the listener thinking about the subject; they are rhetorical, and have no direct answer.

The other questions are designed to stimulate the fear of being a coward, except for the second last one, which is also rhetorical to a lesser degree.

(Shame was  a powerful motivator in those days; women in Britain formed "white feather" brigades that would find single, able-bodied men in the streets and pin white feathers to their coats to show everyone they were too afraid to fight for "the cause" in WW1.)