Lord Tennyson's The Charge Of The Light Brigade

Lord Tennyson’s responsibility as Poet Laureate was to write patriotic poems celebrating and dealing with Britain's greatness. In The Charge of the Light Brigade, the author introduces and honours the values of duty, valour and obedience found in the British Victorian hero. The first stanza opens in the middle of a battle with the order “Charge for the guns!” (6) and the place where it takes place. The exclusion of the name of the man who gives the command to attack underlines the importance, within the poem, of the six hundred men of the Light Brigade; moreover, Stefanie Markovitz States in "On the Crimean War and the Chrage of the Light Brigade" states that the poem “deals impersonally but respectfully with a collective action, an epic deed”,

The line “Boldly they rode and well” (23) injects another value of the soldiers of the Light Brigade: integrity. Despite the fact that the battlefield is compared to the chaos of a storm, with the sounds of the bullets being the thunders, the soldiers never refuse to fulfil their mission, rendering their duty would mean to disappoint their nation, and as a consequence, the reputation of their country. By holding their “sabres bare,/ Flash’d as they turn’d in air” (27-28) and trotting towards their enemies while the latter was shooting them, the six hundred men demonstrate again how valiant they are. Meanwhile, all the attention is on the soldiers of the Light Brigade, it is not until the eight line of the fourth stanza when we find the name of the enemies the “Cossack and

This line also introduces the development of the electric telegraph, which allowed people to follow the actions of the brigade and give support to the brigades' personnel in such a horrible, and yet honourable deed. Unfortunately, the Light Brigade renders the battle, yet not all the soldiers come back since many of them have died. The glorification these soldiers appears under the usage of the pronoun “they” (45), and it refers to both those who have died and those who have survived, appears with the sentence “came thro’ the jaws of Death/ Back from the mouth of Hell” (46 - 47). The resurrection of the dead men happens within the memories; by resurrecting from “the mouth of Hell” (47), the soldiers are elevated and glorified, as they have protected and died honourably in the name of their country. Almost at the end of the poem, Tennyson introduces a rhetorical question: "When can their glory fade?", the poet is not asking for an answer but rather emphasizing that the glory of the soldiers of the Light Brigade cannot, and will not, fade as the sacrifice they have made is not only personal, to fight for one’s own life, but also social.