the charge of the light brigade

“half a league”

• links to themes: WAR AND CONFLICT, OPPRESSION AND INEQUALITY

• Emphatic repetition highlights the sheer distance the soldiers' have to physically and psychologically travel

  • Physically travel to the battleground

  • Psychologically travel away from survival instincts within the mind to a place of blind patriotism and faith

“charge”

• links to themes: WAR AND CONFLICT, OPPRESSION AND INEQUALITY

• Imperative verb - emphasises the complete control the military superiors had over the soldiers

• 'charging' was a military tactic used to overwhelm the opposition

“six hundred”

• links to themes: WAR AND CONFLICT

• Emphatic epistrophe is used at the end of every stanza by Tennyson to aptly construe the scale of loss

“theirs”

• links to themes: OPPRESSION AND INEQUALITY

• The use of the plural personal pronoun portrays the soldiers as passive victims, the chain of event that occurred inevitable

“storm’d with shot and shell”

• links to themes: WAR AND CONFLICT

• Sibilance creates a sinister tone, increasing the aggression portrayed in the violence described

• Sibilance mirrors the sound of a snake, Biblically eluding to the Devil in snake form corrupting humanity during Genesis

  • Links into the semantic field of Biblical references and allusions throughout the poem - "valley of Death"

“when can their glory fade”

• links to themes: WAR AND CONFLICT, OPPRESSION AND INEQUALITY

• Rhetorical question alludes to the poem being a piece of propaganda

• First sentence of the final stanza - this first stanza not starting with the repeated anaphora creates an epitaph (in remembrance) of the soldiers by bringing emphasis to this stanza

  • Connotes a shift from a journalistic to emotive narrative - emphasises how the poem is a living testimony

• This glorification of war only coming within the last stanza demonstrates how the poem is reluctant to portray this view

• Tennyson was only inclined to do this due to his status as poet laureate

structure

• BALLAD FORM

  • this form is widely used by poets to commemorate a story or memorialise a figure/group

• DACTYLIC DIMETER

  • consists of a long syllable followed by a short syllable

  • creates an unrelenting, regular, rhythm, akin to the beating of horse hooves on the ground

  • this rhythm also adds a paradoxical satirical humour to the poem, due to its prevalence in light-hearted contexts

    • eludes to Tennyson’s disagreement with the events of the Battle of Balaklava

AO3

• written in 1854

• as poet laureate, Tennyson was charged to write ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ in order to glorify the patriotism of the British