The main criticism of the poem from an artistic point of view has tended to involve its heavy— almost forced—meter and rhythm and its frequent use of repetition, which critics view as detractions from the overall success of the poem. Nevertheless the poet should be credited with his effective use of sound and imagery in the poem. In 1890, just two years before Tennyson's death, Thomas Edison sent a representative to England with his new recording device to capture the poet's voice as he read his own work. The manner in which Tennyson reads "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is a wonderful reminder of the richness of the sounds in this poem. As Tennyson reads them, the opening lines, "Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward," sound like the galloping of the cavalry horses in the charge, and Tennyson's explosive pronunciation of the first syllable of the word "cannon" in the three lines at the beginning of stanza 3 echoes the explosion of cannonfire that surrounded the soldiers.

In addition to the realistic battle sounds re-created in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," the poem's imagery captures the visual aspects of the battle, particularly in stanza 4 with the flashing of the soldiers' sabres and their plunging into the smoke from all the exploding artillery. Here the Russians are described as turning back from the fierce onslaught of the Light Brigade, but "Not the six hundred." Their return from the battle is postponed until stanza 5, after the Russians had fled; only then do Tennyson's noble but tattered remnants of the British Light Brigade stumble back out of the "jaws of Death" and the "mouth of Hell." Stanza 6 provides a final tribute to these brave heroes as the poet asks, "When can their glory fade?" and calls upon the reader to "Honour the charge they made!" Whether or not the critic finds the heavy metrical pattern or the frequent repetition in this poem to be worthy of a great work of art, most readers would agree that Tennyson's use of these poetic elements, and his mastery of word, sound, and image, make "The Charge of the Light Brigade" a moving and beautiful tribute to a disastrous historic event.

Source: Arnold Markley, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.
Arnold Markley is a freelance writer who has contributed essays and reviews to Approaches to Teaching D. H. Lawrence's Fiction and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. He is currently an Assistant Professor in English at Penn State University, Media, PA.

The Crimean War, the famous charge at Balaclava, and Tennyson's own attitudes toward these matters are universally recognized by the critics, but only because they are universally regarded as embarrassments, both in themselves and to the poem. My own view, however, is that such a critical stance has misunderstood the relation which exists between poems and their historical formats, and that the significance of "The Charge of the Light Brigade," its achievement as a poem, can only appear now through a critical elucidation of the work's historical aspects.

The topical character of the poem is established by its first printing, which was in The Examiner (9 Dec. 1854) one week after Tennyson read of the events at Balaclava and wrote the poem. But the poem is not so much a commentary on the war and British foreign policy in the Crimea as it is a eulogy of the British character. As such, its specific location in time and place focuses the poem's choice of a certain ideological point of view, and that point of view in turn focuses the historical and human drama which the poem embodies and represents. Let us begin to elucidate that drama, to clear away the vaguenesses which have gathered about the poem and permit it to recover its aesthetic resources.

As we have seen, the poem was from the outset a "popular" work—it took its origin in a newspaper report, and it first appeared in the popular press. Indeed, the poem in many respects is a distilled interpretation of the popular reaction to the charge as that reaction was expressed in the newspapers. The Times leader of 13 November 1854 carried the first reasonably complete report of the event, and it began as follows:

We now know the details of the attack on Balaclava ... We have ... in the despatches before us nearly the whole of the loss, which it would be vain to conceal is most lamentable, and all the more so because it seems to have arisen from some misunderstanding ... The disaster ... is not more, but it is not much less, than the annihilation of the Light Cavalry Brigade.... Even accident would have made it more tolerable. But it was a mere mistake—evidently a mistake, and perceived to be such.

The note of puzzlement in this passage will be picked up and repeated throughout the many press rehearsals of the events at Balaclava. The question put in The Times leader on the next day, 14 November, brings into clear focus the central concern expressed in the public reaction: "What is the meaning of a spectacle so strange, so terrific, so disastrous, and yet so grand?" The press reports themselves were to work out their explanations, and these had a profound influence on Tennyson's poem, as we shall see. But the press influence reached Tennyson, first, in the request for an explanation, the demand for a meaning. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is in great measure a response to the question set out in The Times.

We may begin to elucidate Tennyson's answer by looking at the newspaper text of the poem, which was its first printing. The Examiner prints a version of lines 5-6 which contain an interesting variation on the received reading. The latter has:

"Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!"he said:

In the first printing, however, these lines read:

"Forward, the Light Brigade!
Take the guns," Nolan said:

The Examiner, reference to Capt. Lewis Nolan is a concrete detail which would have focused contemporary audience response to the poem in a particular way. Nolan was not just another cavalry officer, but a highly respected and even celebrated figure, and a recognized authority on the management and tactics of cavalry units. In 1853 he published two books which created a sensation in military circles—Cavalry, Its History And Tactics and Nolan's System for Training Cavalry Horses. That he took part in the charge of the Light Brigade, indeed, that he was killed in that charge, was of course common knowledge by the time of Tennyson's poem. Indeed, the detail is only there in the text because Nolan's career and his death were common knowledge.

In the reports which reached England immediately after the charge, Capt. Nolan's name was linked with the infamous "blunder" which sent the brigade to its fate. Controversy boiled around the degree of his responsibility for the disaster, and he characteristically was made the focus of all the explanations. This happened because Nolan epitomized in the public mind "a cavalry enthusiast, who had but lately published his opinion that cavalry could do everything in war," as The Times leader put it. Part of the explanation for the charge at Balaclava, then, lay in the rash enthusiasms of what The Times called "a proud Dragoon officer."

When Thoreau commented on the events at Balaclava from his alien American vantage, he took them to demonstrate "what a perfect machine the soldier is," and in particular what a thoughtless and rather brutish character was the typical British recruit. But Thoreau's view of the poem and its recorded events is based upon a gross misreading not only of the objective facts of the situation, but of the British response to those events. Once again we have to exercise our historical imaginations if we are to see the human drama of this poem as in itself it really is. As we do this, we must at all times remember that the narrative I am reconstituting here is one that was common knowledge at the time.

Tennyson, like so many others in England, first read a full account of the charge in The Times leader of 13 November, and his poem in fact follows this narrative in a number of details, and even uses some of its exact phrasing. The famous lines "What though the soldier knew / Some one had blundered" rework a passage in the newspaper report which says that the cavalry officers "knew well what they were about" when they made their charge, were fully aware that "some hideous blunder" had occurred. Indeed, this is the passage which also supplied Tennyson with the phrase "the valley of Death." "With nothing to lose but themselves, and no inducements out of their profession," the Light Brigade

risked on that day all the enjoyments that rank, wealth, good social position, and many fortunate circumstances can offer ... Splendid as the event was on the Alma, yet that rugged ascent ... was scarcely so glorious as the progress of the cavalry through and through that valley of death, with a murderous fire, not only in front, but on both sides, above, and even in the rear.

The last part of this passage clearly anticipates some of the most well-known lines in Tennyson's poem. Furthermore, the newspaper account draws attention to a crucial aspect of the poem which will not be found in it literatim, but which is none the less present and important: the social standing of the cavalry officers, and the image which the public at the time had of the light cavalry, and especially of the particular units which had been sent to the Crimea. The newspaper's reference to the battle of the Alma, only recently fought, highlights these matters in a way that would have been unmistakable to any contemporary of Tennyson's, but which is necessarily obscure to us now. We must clarify that obscurity.

The charge of the Light Brigade was carried out in three lines. The first was made up of the 13th Light Dragoons and the 17th Lancers; the second of the 11th Hussars; and the third of the 4th Light Dragoons and the principal body of 8th Hussars. This body of light cavalry was in all respects like the rest of the regiments sent to the Crimea; that is to say, they were all the most socially elite units in the British army, spit-and-polish, dashing, and notoriously affected groups which had never seen a battlefield. The units had not been in action since Waterloo, and when they were chosen for the Crimean campaign over the experienced field-tested troops from the Indian frontier, the decision caught the public notice and generated some controversy. Questions were raised whether these "wasp-waisted, dandified army officers, whom the comic magazines loved to caricature, [would] prove to have any of the mettle of the Peninsular or Waterloo" combatants. This question is implicit in the conclusion of "Maud" when the hero of Tennyson's poem declares: "Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind, / We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still." "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is Tennyson's attempt to show not merely that the English aristocracy has not lost its leadership qualities, but in what respect this historically threatened class still exercises its leadership.

This aspect of Tennyson's meaning emerges when we recall that the battle of the Alma was regarded by the English as a noble victory of the English infantry forces; and furthermore, that traditionally, and in the English mind as well, the infantry and the cavalry were distinguished along class lines; and finally, that the cavalry sent to the Crimea was a special object of public concern, and even at times contempt. The charge of the Light Brigade took place in the context of these facts and attitudes, and the popular explanation of the charge which finally emerged (in its first complete form in The Times leader on 14 November) took account of them—as Thoreau's remarks did (and perhaps could) not do.

The cavalry in our service is supposed to have always claimed a species of rank over the infantry. Its frequent attendance on the person of Royalty, its splendid uniforms, and the exemption from colonial service, have made it the favourite resort of the aristocracy, and infected it with the weakness of caste. This has long been so notorious as to be the subject of caricature, which would not have been understood had it not appealed to popular estimate. With these feelings on the two sides, it is no wonder if the cavalry have acted during this campaign with a dignity that rather interfered with their use, and if, on the other hand, the infantry thought the cavalry were saving themselves somewhat too carefully. We believe that this feeling arose much more from the want of a good understanding and a sort of jealousy between the services than from any particular facts; yet, so it is, that from one reason or another the cavalry did little at the Alma, where it was much wanted, and had no other opportunity of distinction during the campaign. We may presume that feelings of this sort would be rather aggravated by the hardships and dangers of the siege, in which, of course, the cavalry could do but little, and by the general want of occasion for its service. Such suspicions and insinuations, unfounded as we believe them to have been, would not be long in finding their way; nor is it likely that such sensitive, high-spirited men, as Lords CARDIGAN and LUCAN would be wholly proof against them. Nothing is more natural than that every feat of daring done by any other branch of the service would be felt as a new summons to do something worthy of the rank assumed by the cavalry. Let us suppose the Light Brigade in view of the enemy on the 25th with such feelings, and spectators of the victorious charge of the Heavy Brigade. Let us further imagine them receiving a written order, in terms that seemed to leave no discretion, to advance and recapture the guns in the hands of the enemy. Let the order be borne, interpreted, and enforced by a cavalry enthusiast, who had but lately published his opinion that cavalry could do everything in war, storm any battery, break any square, whether supported or not. Let the order be passed from officer to officer, each one more jealous of the other, and adding, possibly, personal feelings to a wounded esprit de corps. There you have in the proud Dragoon officer, in the stimulating example, in the grand occasion, the crowd of spectators, the absolute order, the enthusiastic messenger, and peremptory interpreter, too ample explanation of a noble but disastrous deed—a fatal display of courage which all must admire while they lament.

Tennyson's poem grounds itself in the feelings and attitudes which this passage has adopted. The six-hundred dead cavaliers are "noble" still, not merely by virtue of their actual class position, but by reason of their deeds, and the spiritual "nobility" which their deaths have shown. They have not merely equalled, at Balaclava, the victory achieved at Alma by 'the lower orders', they have surpassed them altogether, and regained their rightful place in society: not its political leaders, but its spiritual models.

Tennyson's poem sets out to make the same kind of statement. This is partly why it does not always attract a later middle-class audience, which may find it difficult to generate a sympathetic attitude toward a patently aristocratic poem. Originally the work was able to cross class lines because the event itself exerted a national impact, because in the context of a foreign war class differences and conflicts tended to dissolve in national sympathies. In such a context it would be well for all the social orders if the "superior orders" were not in fact effete and socially ineffectual.

One of the principal technical means which secured this meaning for Tennyson—which in fact enabled his poem to cross class lines and speak to the nation at large—is hidden in the iconography of the poem. The images in "The Charge of the Light Brigade" are drawn from the newspaper accounts of the day, but the form of those images is based upon an iconography of heroism which Tennyson appropriated. His sources are French, bourgeois, and painterly, and his use of them in his English, aristocratic, and verbal work represents another struggle with foreigners which the entire English nation could sympathize with. In this struggle Tennyson means to settle an old score with the French, and to complete, as it were, Wellington's victory at Waterloo: to complete it at the level of ideology.

The key fact about the charge, for Tennyson, is that it took place despite the fact that the cavalry officers understood a blunder had been made somewhere, that the charge was, from the point of view of military tactics, a terrible mistake. The inexorable rhythm of Tennyson's poem:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,

perfectly mirrors the cavalry's implacable movement, and both of these correspondent motions reveal the human elements in the situation that Tennyson wishes to emphasize: the men's steadiness of purpose, as well as their entire understanding of what is involved in their action. "They went with their eyes open," The Times reported, "as if under a spell."

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well.

The reports which came back to England from the battlefield repeatedly emphasized the orderliness of the charge, its steadiness and fearfully determined resolution: "in perfect order," said The Times, "to certain destruction." The English cavalry was generally acknowledged to be manned by the best horsemen in Europe, though it was also widely recognized as a cavalry which had not achieved the successes commensurate with its equestrian talent. Balaclava came to seem what The Times called the "glorious doom" of the Light Brigade, their mission and their fate.

They went as fanatics seek the death that is to save them, and as heroes have sought death in the thick of the fight, when they could no longer hope to conquer ... There was organization and discipline; there was even experience and military skill, at least enough to enable the chiefs to know the terrible nature of the deed ... this was not war, as the French General said; it was a spectacle, and one worthy of the 'cloud of witnesses' that encompassed the performers. (The Times, 14 Nov.)

All these attitudes were to be gathered up into Tennyson's poem, where the Light Brigade's suicide mission becomes, paradoxically, its crowning glory.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.

These lines refer specifically to the newspapers' widespread reports of the astonishment which the charge produced in those who observed it—in particular, in the allied French soldiers. The words of the Morning Chronicle typify the accounts in all the newspapers. "French officers, who saw with dismay the madness of the act and the certainty of destruction, express themselves amazed by the invincible spirit of our men." The remark of the French general Bosquet was reported everywhere and perfectly captures Tennyson's own understanding of the event: " C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."

But Tennyson's poem gives an altogether new meaning to Bosquet's famous remark. Tennyson insisted that he was not a person who favoured or delighted in war, and of course later ages have had little difficulty seeing through his ideological confusions on this matter. If we shift the overtones of Bosquet's observation just a little I think we may see past the evident confusions of Tennyson's mind to its (perhaps) not so evident clarities. For "The Charge of the Light Brigade" describes a cruel and stupid military event as if it were a spiritual, even an aesthetic, triumph. But of course this isn't war, it is magnificence, it is glory. The poem's images present the cavaliers as if they were cast in a tableau, or in a heroic painting—and in one case at least, as if they were statues. The Light Brigade comes before us in Tennyson's poem as an aesthetic object, as we see very clearly in the fourth stanza, where the riders are made to assume the classic pose of the equestrian hero in action. Such a figure lived in the nineteenth-century's eye in a whole array of paintings and statues, some great (e.g., in the work of David, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix), some merely ordinary (e.g., in the statuary familiar throughout the cities of Europe).

Flashed all their sabres bare
Flashed as they turned in air.

The fact that the military gestures in "The Charge of the Light Brigade" are modelled upon a certain tradition of heroic military art is extremely important to see. For that artistic tradition is almost entirely French and it emerges out of the Romantic styles which were connected with Napoleon, the First Empire, and the exploits of the Grande Armee. One has merely to compare, say, David's famous portrait of Napoleon with any of the portraits of Wellington, or even of Nelson, in order to perceive the gulf which separates their ideological points of view. Like Gros's portrait of Murat at the Battle of Aboukir, or Gericault's famous picture of the chasseur of the Imperial Guard, David's picture is charged throughout with various signs of Romantic motion, force, and energy. English painting of the same period never triumphed in this style. Consequently, in the immediately subsequent history the French chasseurs of the Napoleonic wars became heroic models throughout European art and culture, whereas the English cavaliers are either models of equestrian decorum, or objects of broad ridicule—in the last instance, mere aristocratic dandies. Besides, the fact that the heroic French chasseur did not come from the well-born and elite classes of society was an important element in his ideological significance. In this respect he came to stand for the human meaning of the historical events which tore Europe apart at the end of the eighteenth century. Napoleon's world-historical import was epitomized in the figure of the French chasseur, whose exploits in battle overshadowed and surpassed in glory the military acts of Europe's congregated elite forces.

Wellington had won the battle of Waterloo, but England had lost to France the ideological struggle which followed. Indeed, the ancestors of Tennyson's Light Brigade had been present at Waterloo, but their presence was hardly noted and not decisive. Out of the defeat of Napoleon's grand army, artists like Gros and Gericault snatched a brilliant aesthetic triumph. Tennyson's poem deliberately, if perhaps only half-consciously, enters into this complex historical network in order, as it were, to gain for the English cavalry the emblems of the heroism they deserved, but had never had.

Thus it is opportune that it should have been the French who stood by at Balaclava to comment upon the English cavalry's charge. "All the world wondered" at this charge, but that worldwide wonder was appropriately registered in a French accent. More than anyone else they would have understood the meaning of the charge for it was carried out in a famous French manner: the measured, deliberate pace of the Light Brigade's advance had been the wonder of Europe since the grand army invented and defined it.

Tennyson's poem, then, represents an effort to appropriate for an English consciousness those images of heroism which had been defined in another, antithetical culture. The poem conceals an act of revisionist historical criticism, an "Englishing," as it were, of certain French possessions. This revisionist act emphasizes the predominant motive of the entire poem, however, which is to institute through the art of poetry a change of meaning analogous to the one which Gros and Gericault instituted earlier through their painting. The world's wonder at Waterloo had been focused on Napoleon and his armies, despite the fact that England and Wellington had won the military encounter. But the Light Brigade's act at Balaclava offered to Tennyson the chance to change the outcome of England's spiritual and ideological defeat.

Tennyson's method, therefore, is grounded in a set of paradoxes, the most fundamental of which is that his model should have been French and Romantic rather than English and Victorian. Out of this basic paradox Tennyson constructs a series of new and changed views on certain matters of real cultural importance. Most clearly he wants to show that the charge was not a military disaster but a spiritual triumph, and that the men of the English cavalry are not dandified and enervated aristocrats—that they are not merely "noble still," they are the deathless spiritual leader of their country. These changes of meaning are epitomized in the poem's most notable linguistic transformation, whereby Tennyson manages to suggest that the name of the "Light Brigade" bears a meaning which transcends its technical military significance. The pun on the word "Light" points to the quasi-religious identity and mission of this small brigade of cavalry. Indeed, in that pun we observe Tennyson moving his poem out of his secular and non-verbal French models into a Victorian set of attitudes which are peculiarly his own.

This historical reading of Tennyson's poem is an attempt to restore it to our consciousness in something that approximates to its own original terms. The purpose of such a reading, however, is not to make us sympathize with the poem on its own terms—to submit to the poem's peculiar mid-Victorian ideological attitudes. On the contrary, the aim of the analysis is to make us aware of the ideological gulf which separates us from the human world evoked through Tennyson's poem. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" embodies certain specific ideological formations, and it attaches these attitudes and feelings to certain specific events. Everything about this poem—everything about every poem that has ever been written—is time-and place-specific. This we sometimes forget. But we also tend to forget, when considering the employment of an historical criticism, that every reader of every poem is equally time-and place-specific. The function of an historical criticism, properly executed and understood, is to clarify the historical particularities of the entire aesthetic event, whether observed from the vantage of the original work, on the one hand, or of the later reader(s) of that work on the other. A collision of ideologies and consciousness will necessarily take place when such a criticism is set in motion.

Out of that conflict—which is one way of undergoing the aesthetic experience—emerges the sort of light and understanding which poetry was meant to bring: what I would have to call critical sympathy. In the case of "The Charge of the Light Brigade," we re-experience the original Victorian response to that most pitiful of all events: a blundered tragic action. Some of Tennyson's contemporaries, and a large part of Tennyson himself, saw the charge at Balaclava as a kind of heroic tragedy—in the words of one correspondent, 'a grand national sacrifice'. But another part of the population, and another part of Tennyson, understood that it was only a kind of heroic tragedy, and that its blundered and failed aspects gave it a different quality altogether. For in the end the poem rests in an evident, a simple, yet a profound contradiction which is the basis of all its related sets of contradictions. The Light Brigade achieved, in its famous assault, an immortality, a final spiritual triumph. In the event it suffered as well, in the words of The Times, a human "catastrophe," an "annihilation." This triumph is also "The disaster ... of which the mere shadow has darkened so many a household among us." Tennyson's poetry is in the pity even as it is also in the glory.

The poem, in other words, embodies an original set of contradictions which can be of use to us as its inheritors, as its subsequent readers. For we too, like Tennyson and his contemporaries, intersect with our own age and experience—including our experience with this poem—in certain specific and ideologically determined ways. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is important for us precisely because of the differential which it necessarily represents. Indeed, I should even venture to say that its importance as a cultural resource, for us today, will be a function of our immediate lack of interest in it or hostility toward it. Time and human experience—which are the measures of all future experience—have sanctioned the achievement of this work. Whatever immediate or practical usefulness it may have rests with us, and particularly with those of us (or that part of ourselves) who feel most alienated from the (piteous, not tragic) human experience enacted in this poem.

Source: Jerome J. McGann, "Interpretation and Critical History," in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory, Clarendon Press, 1985, pp. 191-202.