374. AEC 201: The Charge of the Light Brigade (2)
The Charge of the Light Brigade" is an 1854 narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson about the cavalry charge of the same name at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story. Tennyson was an English poet who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign. The Charge of the Light Brigade was a military action undertaken by British light cavalry against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, resulting in many casualties to the cavalry.
The Crimean War was fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, the Second French Empire, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont (the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily & Piedmont was appanage or grant of the County of Savoy of Holy Roman Empire) from October 1853 to February 1856.
The Charge of the Light Brigade” was written by the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson in response to a battle during the Crimean War (1853-1855). In this battle, a British cavalry unit namely the “Light Brigade” was commanded to charge against a Russian artillery unit. The order was almost suicidal, and the brigade was decimated in the charge. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” celebrates the self-sacrifice and heroism of the cavalrymen, suggesting that bravery consists of doing one's duty even when it leads to almost certain death.
The events were the subject of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's narrative poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), published six weeks after the event. Its lines emphasise the valour of the cavalry in carrying out their orders regardless of the risk. Tennyson's poem, written 2 December and published on 9 December 1854, in The Examiner, praises the brigade ("When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made!") while trenchantly mourning the appalling futility of the charge ("Not tho' the soldier knew, someone had blunder'd ... Charging an army, while all the world wonder'd"). Tennyson wrote the poem only a few minutes after reading an account of the battle in The Times, according to his grandson Sir Charles Tennyson. It immediately became hugely popular, and even reached the troops in the Crimea, where 1,000 copies were distributed in pamphlet form.
The Light Brigade was the British light cavalry force. It rode unarmoured, light, fast horses. The men were armed with lances and sabres. The Heavy Brigade under James Scarlett. The Light Brigade set off down the valley with Cardigan in front, leading the charge on his horse Ronald. The Light Brigade faced withering fire from three sides which devastated their force on the ride, yet they were able to engage the Russian forces at the end of the valley and force them back from the redoubt. Nonetheless, they had suffered heavy casualties and were soon forced to retire. The surviving Russian artillerymen returned to their guns and opened fire.
Summary
The poem tells the story of a brigade consisting of 600 soldiers who rode on horseback into the “valley of death” for half a league (about one and a half miles). They were obeying a command to charge the enemy forces that had been seizing their guns.
Not a single soldier was discouraged or distressed by the command to charge forward, even though all the soldiers realized that their commander had made a terrible mistake: “Someone had blundered.” The role of the soldier is to obey and “not to make reply...not to reason why,” so they followed orders and rode into the “valley of death.”
The 600 soldiers were assaulted by the shots of shells from canons in front and on both sides of them. Still, they rode courageously forward toward their own deaths: “Into the jaws of Death / Into the mouth of hell / Rode the six hundred.”
The soldiers struck the enemy gunners with their unsheathed swords (“sabres bare”) and charged at the enemy army while the rest of the world looked on in wonder when made known. They rode into the artillery smoke and broke through the enemy line, destroying the Cossack and Russian opponents. Then they rode back from the offensive, but they had lost many men so they were “not the six hundred” any more.
Canons behind and on both sides of the soldiers now assaulted them with shots and shells. As the brigade rode “back from the mouth of hell,” soldiers and horses collapsed; few remained to make the journey back.
The world marvelled at the courage of the soldiers; indeed, their glory is undying: the poem states these noble 600 men remain worthy of honor and tribute today.
Form
This poem is comprised of six numbered stanzas varying in length from six to twelve lines. Each line is in dimeter, which means it has two stressed syllables; moreover, each stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed syllables, making the rhythm dactylic. The use of “falling” rhythm, in which the stress is on the first beat of each metrical unit, and then “falls off” for the rest of the length of the meter, is appropriate in a poem about the devastating fall of the British brigade.
The rhyme scheme varies with each stanza. Often, Tennyson uses the same rhyme (and occasionally even the same final word) for several consecutive lines: “Flashed all their sabres bare / Flashed as they turned in air / Sab’ring the gunners there.” The poem also makes use of anaphora, in which the same word is repeated at the beginning of several consecutive lines: “Cannon to right of them / Cannon to left of them / Cannon in front of them.” Here the method creates a sense of unrelenting assault; at each line our eyes meet the word “cannon,” just as the soldiers meet their flying shells at each turn.
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” recalls a disastrous historical military engagement that took place during the initial phase of the Crimean War fought between Turkey and Russia (1854-56). Under the command of Lord Raglan, British forces entered the war in September 1854 to prevent the Russians from obtaining control of the important sea routes through the Dardanelles. From the beginning, the war was plagued by a series of misunderstandings and tactical blunders, one of which serves as the subject of this poem: on October 25, 1854, as the Russians were seizing guns from British soldiers, Lord Raglan sent desperate orders to his Light Cavalry Brigade to fend off the Russians. Finally, one of his orders was acted upon, and the brigade began charging—but in the wrong direction! Over 650 men rushed forward, and well over 100 died within the next few minutes. As a result of the battle, Britain lost possession of the majority of its forward defenses and the only metaled road in the area.
In the 21st century, the British involvement in the Crimean War is dismissed as an instance of military incompetence; we remember it only for the heroism displayed in it by Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse. However, for Tennyson and most of his contemporaries, the war seemed necessary and just. He wrote this poem as a celebration of the heroic soldiers in the Light Brigade who fell in service to their commander and their cause. The poem glorifies war and courage, even in cases of complete inefficiency and waste.
Unlike the medieval and mythical subject of “The Lady of Shalott” or the deeply personal grief of “Tears, Idle Tears,” this poem instead deals with an important political development in Tennyson’s day. As such, it is part of a sequence of political and military poems that Tennyson wrote after he became Poet Laureate of England in 1850, including “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (1852) and “Riflemen, Form” (1859). These poems reflect Tennyson’s emerging national consciousness and his sense of compulsion to express his political views.
This poem is effective largely because of the way it conveys the movement and sound of the charge via a strong, repetitive falling meter: “Half a league, half a league / Half a league onward.” The plodding pace of the repetitions seems to subsume all individual impulsiveness in ponderous collective action. The poem does not speak of individual troops but rather of “the six hundred” and then “all that was left of them.” Even Lord Raglan, who played such an important role in the battle, is only vaguely referred to in the line “someone had blundered.” Interestingly, Tennyson omitted this critical and somewhat subversive line in the 1855 version of this poem, but the writer John Ruskin later convinced him to restore it for the sake of the poem’s artistry. Although it underwent several revisions following its initial publication in 1854, the poem as it stands today is a moving tribute to courage and heroism in the face of devastating defeat.