The Last Of The Light Brigade Shame Essay

Through his poem, The Last of The Light Brigade, Rudyard Kipling acutely castigates the attitude of the English to war veterans while further sharply denouncing Alfred Tennyson and highlighting the disparity and brittleness of war veterans. This is certainly shown through Kipling’s capitalisation of “Shame” as if it was a proper noun denoting the importance of the shame caused by the English lack of support for those left in the Light Brigade. This is further expanded on through Kipling’s utilisation of an anaphora of the word “they” to signify the devaluation of the Light Brigade to the English as they funded criminals and animals over their own veterans. The consistent lack of support and care is further highlighted through Kipling’s lexical

The censorious critique of Tennyson by Kipling was further broadened through Kipling’s use of an imperative through denoting how the Light Brigade asked Tennyson to “Please, write we are starving now.”, exhibiting how despite lionising the soldiers through his poem, Tennyson failed to describe the frail state the survivors of the Light Brigade were in. This was further expanded on through Kipling’s use of an antithesis by denoting how while “they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song” to describe how despite the figural immortality given to the Light Brigade by Tennyson, they still were physically dying. The fragility of the remainates of the Light Brigade is further shown through Kipling’s use of an expanded noun phrase to denote how the “desolate little cluster” comprising the Light Brigade displays how only a severely limited number of people survived from the original Light Brigade. Kipling further utilises a shared semantic field surrounding the notion of poverty through making use of the lexical choices of “toil”, “empty” and