Employing synecdoche, Kipling uses his poem to expose the terrible hardship faced in old age by veterans of the Crimean War, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the light brigade who charged at the Battle of Balaclava. He tells us, point blank, to respect and remember these noble war heroes. 'The Last of the Light Brigade' is a poem written in 1890 by Rudyard Kipling echoing thirty-six years after the event Alfred Tennysons famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. This is a really public poem with a single purpose and Tennyson doesn't have time to be subtle at the end.The speaker orders us, as if he was a general, to "Honour the Light Brigade." The poem ends with a couple of commands.Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred! This poem is spreading the word, telling us all that we should "wonder" at this incredible display of bravery. Why did the Charge of the Light Brigade happen The pencil-written order was handed to Captain Louis Nolan, the finest horseman on the staff. Line 52 is a repeat of line 31, and a reminder that this is a story meant to amaze the entire world.It is the Light Brigade's desperate, "wild" charge that the speaker wants us to remember.O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. This is an example of poetry having a real effect on how we remember history. You're reading this poem, right? Which means the bravery of the Light Brigade has been remembered for over 150 years. You know what? So far it seems to have worked. The job of this poem is to make the courage of these British soldiers immortal. This line – "When can their glory fade?" – bursts in like the sound of a trumpet.We're watching Tennyson turn the soldiers of the Light Brigade into legends. Image: The Charge of the Light Brigade, by William Simpson (1855) Wikimedia Commons. 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. This brigade was supposed to pursue a Russian artillery train, but, due to miscommunication, was instead sent into a frontal assault against the heavily armed, well-prepared Russian defense. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. The famous charge of the British light cavalry took place at the Battle of Balaclava on October 25th, 1854. 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). 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. 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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