matthew bevis
The poem is one such action, and honours the men by refusing to stay silent
aboutblunders. The piece was built on an adaptation ofThe Timesreport, which
had referred to ‘some hideous blunder’; Tennyson reshaped it to ‘Some one had
blundered’ and explained that ‘the line kept running in my head, and I kept
saying it over and over till it shaped itself into the burden of the poem’.^38 This
‘burden’—meaning both ‘that which is borne’and ‘the refrain or chorus of a
song’ (OED)—weighs heavy on the poem, for so insistent was this sound, and
this military error, that the Laureate rhymed it with words that deviated from
the Queen’s English (according to Tennyson’s friend, W. F. Rawnsley, ‘hundred’
is pronounced ‘hunderd’ in Lincolnshire).^39 What we hear in these sounds, and
in sounds that drum through the poem (‘thundered’, ‘soldier’, ‘sabres’, ‘gunners’,
‘shattered’, ‘sundered’), is a ghost of the words ‘err’ and ‘erred’. These whispers are
the poem’s burden, words uttered under its breath, and echoed again in the line ‘All
the world wondered’, where ‘wondered’ condenses the poem’s mix of awestruck
admiration and perplexed incredulity. It also carries within it the sound of the
poem’s pride for the men alongside its awareness of the pointlessness of their death
(‘won’,‘erred’).AnexemplaryVictorianwarpoem,‘TheChargeoftheLightBrigade’
sounds war’s heroism, but it also sounds it out. In doing so, the poem demands an
admiring spectatorship even as it remains wary of turning war into a spectator sport.
The progress of the Crimean War was marked by much poetry that sang of
arms and the man in a less equivocal fashion—Gerald Massey’sWar Waits(1855)
and James Friswell’s anthologySongs of the War, both of which emphasized ‘that
fund of patriotism which is the safeguard of any kingdom, however mismanaged or
misgoverned’.^40 Yet many poets who supported the war were intent on highlighting
the messiness of the business: Martin Tupper’s ‘The Van and the Rear’ begins
‘Brilliant troops in proud array,|Thrilling trumpets, rattling drums’, before the
rear quickly makes itself heard in the next stanza: ‘Mangled wretches, horrors
dire,|Groans and curses, wounds and woes.’^41 Moreover, writers who opposed
the war were raising their voices in collections like Ernest Jones’sThe Battle-Day
and Other Poems(1855), Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell’sSonnets on the
War(1855), and Dobell’sEngland in Time of War(1856). EvenThe Times,so
often critical of the war, grew impatient with these poetic developments: ‘Aeschylus
fought at Marathon, Milton was the secretary of Cromwell, Goethe a minister of
state. Instead of this, what have we now? Poets hiding themselves in holes and
corners.’^42 This comment is from a review of one of the most important war
(^38) Tennyson, quoted in Matthew Bevis (ed.),Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson(London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 84.
(^39) W. F. Rawnsley, quoted in Bevis (ed.),Lives, 83.
(^40) James Friswell (ed.),Songs of the War(London: Ward & Lock, 1855), p. ii.
(^41) Martin Tupper, ‘The Van and the Rear’, inA Batch of War Ballads(London: Bosworth, 1854), 6.
(^42) The Times, 25 Aug. 1855, 8.Punchechoed such criticisms; see ‘The War Poets’,Punch,28(13
Jan. 1854), 17.