TRICIA LOOTENS"The song that nerves a nation's heart, / Is in itself a deed" (79-80).
Whatever his later doubts about "The Charge of the Light Brigade,"
Tennyson seems to have seen the poem as such a deed: he had it printed on
fly-leaves and sent to the soldiers of the Crimean military hospital at
Scutari. 34 Termed, in M. van Wyk Smith's words, "probably the last great
battle-piece that could be written in English," 35 Tennyson's poem stands at
a watershed partly of its own making. "Some one had blundered" (12): the
phrase (mis)remembered from a London Times account of the Crimean
War disaster Tennyson immortalized, resonated within and beyond a
British public newly critical of heavily aristocratic military leadership. In
omitting all but three poems of their Crimean War Lyrics (1855) from their
Collected Poems (1897), for example, poets Louisa and Arabella Shore
explained that "we have learned to regard the Crimean War, in spite of the
heroism of our soldiers, not as a just cause and a glorious achievement so
much as a deplorable blunder." 36 Socially high-ranking but generally
inexperienced soldiers comprised the Light Brigade. As McGann has
demonstrated, by focusing on the heroism of elite units "The Charge of the
Light Brigade" actually celebrates that "historically threatened class," the
aristocracy. 37 Nonetheless, Tennyson's blunt acknowledgment of high-level
military incompetence presages a shift in the subjective position of the
patriotic poetry of war. By the time of the second Anglo-Boer War
(1899-1902), when literate armed forces and new journalistic technologies
intersected with larger changes in the discourse of realism, this shift would
be decisive. Henceforth, much of the patriotic poetry of war would be
spoken through, if not always by, soldiers. 38 No writer would be more
crucial to such a shift than the man whom W.D. Ho wells would call the
"laureate" of "larger England" - Rudyard Kipling. 39
V"Kipling is a jingo imperialist," George Orwell wrote in 1942. "He is
morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by
admitting that, and then to try to find out why he still survives while the
refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly." 40
Orwell's project remains irresistible; for no other late-Victorian poet's
patriotic writing has demonstrated such vitality, while provoking (and
earning) such hostility, even from some of its most sympathetic critics.
What frequently renders Kipling's patriotic poetry compelling is its radical
instability - an instability grounded in questions of affiliation and exile.
J.M.S. Tompkins points out that Kipling called England "the most
interesting foreign country I have ever been in"; but, she adds, "he also
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