charge of the light brigade

• Charge of the Light Brigade

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  SUMMARY

  • Honour, nobility, bravery of soldiers

  • Puts a twist on an infamously catastrophic event, instead celebrates the soldiers' sacrifice

  • A damning criticism of the leadership of the aristocracy who sent men to their deaths through miscommunication

  • Futility of war
• 'Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,

  • Dactylic rhythm - 1 stressed syllable followed by 2 unstressed. Echoes the sound and pace of the horses’ hooves - reflecting the Light Brigade’s gallop into battle on horseback.

  • Repetition - rigidity of soldiers' obedience
• all in the valley of Death'

  • 'Valley of Death' - death capitalised, personified - inevitable death of soldiers. Intertextual link to Psalm 23, 'though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no Evil' - Biblical allusion highlights awe-inspiring nature & elevates the importance of the event to Victorian audience
• 'Someone had blundered'

  • Breaks dactylic diameter - 'blundered' - only followed by one unstressed syllable not two - emphasises mistake

  • Placing blame on Lord Cardigan
• 'Cannon to the right of them,

  Cannon to the left of them,

  Cannon in front of them

  Volleyed and thundered'

  • Anaphora (repetition at start of line) - surrounded by enemy, no escaping deaths. Sense of claustrophobia

  • Volleyed and thundered - powerful verbs show the quick succession & strong force of the enemy fire
• 'Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred!

  • Rhyming couplets 'made' 'Brigade' - perfection & rightness, like their legacy

  • Exclamation marks - enthusiasm - positivity rather than negative remorse for the failure & their deaths

  • Emotive final line calls reader to remember the soldiers for their bravery
• STRUCTURE

  • Written in a dactylic diameter - one stress syllable followed by two unstressed

  • This is a ‘falling rhythm’ - the stress is on the first beat of each metrical unit, and then weakens for the rest of the meter - like the failure of authority in battle

  • 6 stanzas, perhaps representing the 600 doomed soldiers

  • Repeated refrain of 'rode the 600' = the rigid obedience of the soldiers
• CONTEXT

  • The Charge of the Light Brigade was a failed military action involving the British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan during the Battle of Balaclava 1854, in the Crimean War.

  • Tennyson wrote the poem as a dramatic tribute to the 673 British Cavalrymen

  • Victorian times - criticising the ordered way of life & it's blind obedience & sense of duty