Poetry Out Loud Selection: "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

            “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is one of my favorite poems. I chose it because I tend to enjoy poems about war and military, particularly those of noble feats. This poem is based on the Battle of Balaclava from the Crimean War. Through a series of errors, the Light Brigade was sent down a valley for a mile and a quarter to seize eight heavy artillery. While they did eventually make it to the line of cannon to slaughter those defending them, the regiment returned with only 426 out of 673 men who set out, and of those, only 195 still had horses. Tennyson brings up some interesting themes about war in his poem. In the second stanza he talks about how the duty of the soldiers required them “not to make a reply” to their orders, “not to reason why,” but just to “do and die.” It makes me consider the heavy weight of mistakes in war they tend to cause great bloodshed. The lines, rhythmic construction, and various forms of repetition somehow make the poem itself sound like a cavalry charge. The repetition involves not only many short or repeated phrases, but also a spread of similar unifying words. The unity could possibly reflect the uniformed nature of the military. There is also a ton of parallelism to mirror the ranks of the cavalry. This can be seen in the “Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them” and in other places. The repeated patterns fall apart in the fourth stanza. Instead, the word choice is more varied and arrhythmic such as in the lines “Plunged in the battery-smoke/ Right thro' the line they broke.” The number of lines per stanza rises from the beginning to the climax in paragraph four, and then decreases to the calm ending concerning the glorious legacy of the Light Brigade.