Charge Of The Light Brigade Comparison

Essay question ~ How are the conditions of war presented in "Charge Of the Light Brigade" and one other poem from Power and Conflict?

In Charge Of the Light Brigade and Exposure, the conditions of the reality of war is elucidated illuminatively. In Charge of The Light Brigade, the poet recites a cavalry charge against the Russians, who shot at the lightly-armed British. The poem is a celebration itself of the men's courage and devotion to their country, and it magestically stresses the soldiers' supremacy throughout. In Exposure, the poet explicates the imagery of cold and warm of a man suffering from hypothermia and how it reflects his delusional, hallucinative mind. The poet clearly wants to draw attention to the suffering monotony and

Throughout the poem, there's six stanzas, each representing a hundred men who took part. The first stanza is tightly structured, which mirrors the cavalry formation. The repetition of "six hundred" at the end of each stanza is an epistrophe which italicises huge loss, it also creates a sense of impending boom and inevitability and that it also reinforces the idea of large numbers of men involved with the references to them, which summarises the story of the battle. The rhythm of the poem is written in dactylic dimeter and this mirrors the sound of horses galloping and it increases the poems pace. It also stresses the first syllable of each word, making the main purpose of the poem more visible. In Exposure, the poem has eight stanzas with no real progression. The last stanza ends with the same words, "but nothing happens" , as the first one, this reflects the monotony of life in the trenches and the absence of change. The repetition also suggests the lack of progress and continual waiting, it also creates a circular structure and implies never-ending suffering. The rhyme scheme ABBA and hexameter gives the poem and often pararhymes: "nervous" and "knive us", this articulates that the poem is barely put together and its destruction, just like the soldiers. The entire poem is living in a sense of anxiety and fear and that even anti-climax war is pointless if men are losing their lives not even