![]() ![]() They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack They strove to stand to attention, to straighten the toil-bowed back To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song Īnd, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,Ī desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade. They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong, The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites." ![]() Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they Īnd an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door Īnd the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four! That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song. They felt that life was fleeting they knew not that art was long, They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade. They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night. Image: The Charge of the Light Brigade, by William Simpson (1855) Wikimedia Commons.There were thirty million English who talked of England's might, 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. 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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