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The Charge of the Light Brigade | Introduction

Tennyson wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in a few minutes on December 2, 1854, after reading an article in the London Times about the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, which was fought from 1853 to 1856 between Russia on one side and England, France, Turkey, and Sardinia on the other. According to his son, Hallam Tennyson, it was the poet's method to catch phrases that attracted his interest, which he "rolled about, so to speak, in his head, before he wrote them down." In this case, the phrase from the newspaper article was "some hideous blunder," which appears in the poem as "someone had blundered": this might indicate that Tennyson was seeking to blame someone for the disastrous massacre that wiped out the Light Brigade, but the "someone" is never mentioned again. This poem is about courage, not about the bad luck or stupidity that put the men of the Light Brigade cavalry in a position to display that courage.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" was first published in the December 9, 1854, issue of the London Examiner and was later included in Tennyson's collection Maud, and Other Poems, in 1855. In 1850, Tennyson was appointed by Queen Victoria to succeed Wordsworth as poet laureate of England. Although Victoria's reign is associated with the Enlightenment, a time when logic and reason were the celebrated ideals, this poem celebrates the native dignity of the uneducated cavalrymen, of whom Tennyson says, "Theirs was not to reason why." Perhaps because it celebrates the common man at a time of social change that generally favored the intellectual, the poem was tremendously popular in its day, although generations that followed have remembered it, usually negatively, as a celebration of war's glory. In Tennyson's time, though, the poem had such all-around popularity that the poet was induced years later to return to the same battle, in a poem examining a much more successful assault by the British troops: "The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava," published in 1885's Tiresias and Other Poems.

The Charge of the Light Brigade Summary

Lines 1-4:
The beginning lines of the poem throw the reader into the center of action, with a rousing chant that drives the reader, both in its description and in its galloping rhythm, toward the battle. A "league" is approximately three miles long: charging horses could cover half a league in a few minutes. The audiences of the time of the poem would have been familiar with the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, upon which the poem is based, and would have known from the beginning that they were charging to their own doom. (As the poem soon makes clear, the six hundred cavalrymen of the Light Brigade were aware of this themselves.) The poem suggests that it is these moments before the battle has begun that are the Brigade's greatest glory. The phrase "Valley of Death" refers to an episode of John Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress and to Psalm 23 from the New Testament of the Bible: in both of these sources, faith makes people brave when they are faced with death.

Lines 5-8:
In the earliest published version of this poem, printed in the London Examiner on December 9, 1854, the command to charge forward was attributed to Lord Nolan, a well-known military figure of the time. In changing the speaker to an anonymous "he," the poet shifts the focus of the poem away from individual actions and decisions onto matters of record, and onto the roles played by followers and leaders in military situations everywhere. In addition to obscuring the identity of the speaker, this final version of the poem changes the command given from "Take the guns" to "Charge for the guns!" This heightens the sense of the danger of the charge, while leaving unstated the reason for charging into the blaring gunfire.

Lines 9-12:
No sooner does line 9 repeat the shouted command that sends the Light Brigade to their doom than line 10 makes the reader wonder whether any of the soldiers were stricken with fear upon hearing the command. Although we currently closely associate the word "dismay" with "shock," its actual meaning includes a loss of courage. By raising this issue as a question and then answering that no, there was no fear, Tennyson gives the reader a moment's pause to let the full extent of the soldiers' bravery sink in. Line 11 and line 12 tell the reader without question that every member of the Brigade knew that this order was a mistake. This contradiction—the fact that the soldiers knew they were likely to die because of a "blunder" in military strategy, yet charged forward without fear anyway—gives the poem a psychological depth that would be lost if it merely celebrated the loyalty of soldiers who were unaware of the faulty command they were following.

Lines 13-17:
Lines 13 through 15 repeat each other, in the way... » Complete The Charge of the Light Brigade Summary