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Charge Of The Light Brigade Essay

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Textual Analysis project - The Last of the Light Brigade Shreyas Gopalakrishnan SR Number - 11955 Out of curiosity, I googled “The greatest poems ever written” and went through the list, trying to see how many of the authors I recognized. Alfred Lord Tennyson stood out immediately. I had read “The Brooke”, a poem by him in our class 10 English Textbook. The poem being quoted in the list was titled “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and it was a fictionalised account of the charge of the English Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava (during the Crimean War) due to a miscommunication. Light Brigade is a term used for lightly armoured troops on horseback and this particular light brigade was led by Lord Cardigan. The Crimean War was fought between the Russians and an alliance comprising of the British, the French, the Sardinians and the Ottoman Empire in the years 1853 to 1856. The war was fought because the Russians wanted control over the Ottoman territories …show more content…

This radical patriotism being preached here seems unacceptable to the 21st century human. On reading the Wikipedia article on “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, I found that 40 years later a poem called “The Last of the Light Brigade” was written which focussed on the hardships faced by the war veterans and the pathetic response of the British public when asked to aid the veterans. This poem was authored by Rudyard Kipling, an author familiar to all of us because of his immensely popular “Jungle Book”. He was Indian born, this Indian connect coupled with the fact that this poem reflected a situation that it is still a huge predicament, even today piqued my curiosity and I explored this poem further. This is the story of how I picked this piece of poetry as my

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