Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and patriotism

under which the speaker has imagined his own sentient and thwarted dust
blossoming "in purple and red" (I. 923)? In a poem permeated by drowning
imagery, moreover, the speaker is now sailing toward the "blood-red
blossom of war" (III. 53) - preceded by the diseased mechanical phantom
of Maud, the patriotic anti-Muse.
The Crimean War (1854-56), which appears to the speaker of Maud as a
cause to hold "good" and "true," scarcely delivered on such promises.
Undertaken in opposition to Russian incursions upon the vulnerable - and
corrupt - Ottoman Empire, the Crimean War may have been unnecessary;
and it has won fame primarily through exposes of military incompetence. It
was, however, Victorian Britain's only major European war; and for many
nineteenth-century writers, hatred of the Russian Czar (which moved not
only Tennyson but also the likes of Karl Marx), ensured sympathy for
Britain's and France's claims to altruistic protection of Turkey. For these
and other reasons, the Crimean War powerfully affected Victorian poetry.
No Crimean writing, however, achieved anything like the fame of another
of Tennyson's poems, "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

"It is not a poem on which I pique myself," Tennyson noted 32 ; yet
echoing what must have been thousands of parlor performances, the
Laureate's own sonorous voice can still be heard, preserved by one of the
earliest poetic recording sessions, intoning, "Half a league, half a league,
half a league onward" (1). In the drama of Tennyson's "Charge," the fate of
Hemans's "Casabianca" plays out on a grand scale: senseless sacrifice had
perhaps never been so successfully celebrated. "Their's not to reason why, /
Their's but to do and die" (14-15): this line's repellent resonance with the
phrase "only following orders" is partly, if only partly, anachronistic. Not
all orders are alike, after all; and the idealized Victorian soldier's "trade"
was, as John Ruskin stressed, "not slaying, but being slain." 33 "Who fears
to die?" (AT 1) is the question that opens Tennyson's "English Warsong"
(1830), one of the young poet's earliest efforts at patriotic verse. Still, as
Tennyson's own "Epilogue" to the much later poem "The Charge of the
Heavy Brigade at Balaclava" (1885) makes clear, many of the Laureate's
own contemporaries challenged his poetry's bloodthirstiness. "Who loves
War for War's own sake" (AT 29), his defensive "POET" tells one such critic

• a young woman suitably named "IRENE" (which means peace) - "Is fool,
  or crazed, or worse" (30). Yet even if "that realm were in the wrong / For
  which her warriors bleed, / It still were right to crown with song / The
  warrior's noble deed" (33-36).

The coda of Tennyson's "Epilogue" is styled a plea of "the Singer for his
Art" (AT 77). Suggestively, as Tennyson's speaker defends patriotic poetry
to lovers of peace, he also defends poetic composition as patriotic action:

267