![]() However, the poem also presents the view that taking orders and serving one's country is honourable, “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”. Tennyson communicates disgust at the treatment of the men, "Someone had blundered" in the decision to attack. Their actions were recognised for the first time in 1857, when Queen Victoria awarded the Victoria Cross to gallant servicemen regardless of class or rank. But the heroes who returned from Crimea were the common, ordinary men who fought for their country. Previously military heroes were gentleman of the upper classes. The Charge of the Light Brigade is an emotive poem which both praises and laments the action of the battle.ĭuring the Crimean War the idea of the heroic and brave British soldier emerged, whose moral duty was to fight for justice. Image: The Charge of the Light Brigade, by William Simpson (1855) Wikimedia Commons.Tennyson's job as poet laureate was to capture the public mood. ![]() He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. The poem The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is a patritic poem about how war was difficult and how soldiers had to fight to survive. the images and descriptions in the poem relate to warfare: cannon, bullets, smoke, sabres, etc. You can listen to Tennyson reading the poem here: it’s one of the very first recordings of a poet reading their own work (though not quite the first: that honour goes to Robert Browning). The purpose of The Charge of the Light Brigade is to remind readers of generations of the honor and glory of the men who marched into the battle. The Charge of the Light Brigade Theme of Warfare. Tennyson’s use of the word ‘left’ (‘All that was left of them, / Left of six hundred’) picks up on the word’s use earlier in the same stanza (‘Cannon to left of them’), but shifts the word’s meaning from a spatial sense to one denoting the sacrifice the men have made.Īs the old line attributed to Bertrand Russell has it, war doesn’t determine who is right – only who is left. These words were made famous by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, and refer to that fateful day on 25th October 1854 when around six hundred men led by Lord Cardigan rode into the unknown. ![]() Why are these men, members of this light brigade, being ordered to charge into the heavy cannon-fire of the enemy?Īfter the charge, not much remains of the ‘six hundred’ who rode into battle – nearly half of them had sustained heavy injuries or been killed, while the other half felt that the whole charge had been a colossal waste of life. The absence of ‘the’ from the line also makes it sound a little odd or unnatural, once again suggesting that there is something wrong here. They will do it and die, for queen and country.Īnother line that is often misremembered is ‘Cannon to right of them’, which is sometimes erroneously rendered as ‘Cannon to the right of them’, which disrupts the rigid rhythm of the line (the poem is written largely in dactylic metre): the omission of ‘the’ makes the line sound slightly curtailed and hurried, evoking the rashness of the charge itself. But Tennyson’s point is that there is no question of whether the soldiers will fail to carry out their military duty, even when presented with such a wrongheaded command to charge. The famous line of the poem, ‘Their’s but to do and die’, is often misquoted as ‘Their’s but to do or die’, which gives the poem a different inflection. Many of Tennyson’s Victorian readers would have found such a message comforting, despite some of them – and Tennyson himself – harbouring doubts over the literal truth of Christianity. As with much war poetry – and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is, after all, a war poem – Tennyson uses biblical allusions to bring home the grand sacrifice made by the soldiers: ‘the valley of death’ is from the 23rd Psalm (that’s the one that begins ‘The Lord is my shepherd…’): ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’Īs well as contributing to the sonorous note of the poem, this allusion also offers comfort: men may make blunders, but the Lord will see that good overcomes evil.
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