fighting talk Crimean war’.^35 Aroundthe time of composition, the poet admitted that, despite
his official position as Victoria’s Laureate, he was unable to sympathize ‘at this
hour with any song of triumph when my heart almost bursts with indignation at
the accursed mismanagement of our noble little army, that flower of men’.^36 This
indignation can be glimpsed in his poem:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Some one had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
·····
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.^37The soldiers made a charge, not a reply, and Tennyson’s poem, as if to make some
form of reparation, does the opposite. The soldiers followed orders and asked no
questions; the poem gives orders and poses questions (‘Was there a man dismayed?’
does not quite manage to be rhetorical). Part of its strength comes from the way in
which Tennyson does not make the soldiers’ suffering feel like a mere inevitability
(‘Some one had blundered’), even though it acknowledges that the men had no
choice (‘Theirs but to do and die’). The poem is at once drawn to honour the
sacrifice they made and angered by the necessity of having to honour this event at
all, hence the reference to the ‘wild’ charge, which is similar to Russell’s ‘excess of
courage’ (somewhere between a rebuke and a compliment), before the adjective is
dropped a couple of lines later for the sake of good form.ContraWilfred Owen,
this war poetry does not reside ‘in the pity’, for Tennyson is aware that to invite
only pity may be to invite complacency. Rather, when we are told to ‘honour’ the
Light Brigade, the imperative signals not only the need for remembrance, but also
for an answering action (to ‘honour’ as one would honour a debt).
(^35) Trudi Tate, ‘On Not Knowing Why: Memorializing the Light Brigade’, in Helen Small and Trudi
Tate (eds.),Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 166. 36
Tennyson to unknown recipient [probably Sydney Dobell], 23 Jan. 1855, inThe Letters of Alfred
Lord Tennyson, ii, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 104.
(^37) Tennyson, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, inPoems of Tennyson, ii, ed. Christopher Ricks,
2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1987), 511–13.