The Charge of the Light Brigade (poem)

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The Charge of the Light Brigade
Charge of the Light Brigade.jpg
Richard Caton Woodville Jr.'s 1894 painting of the eponymous Charge of the Light Brigade, the event that inspired the poem
Written2 December 1854
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Publication date9 December 1854
Metre Dactylic metre
Full text
Wikisource-logo.svg The Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson) at Wikisource

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" is an 1854 narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson about the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. He wrote the original version on 2 December 1854, and it was published on 9 December 1854 in The Examiner. He was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom at the time. The poem was subsequently revised and expanded for inclusion in Maud and Other Poems (1855).

Contents

History

Composition

Tennyson as photographed by Lewis Carroll in 1857 Alfred Tennyson by Lewis Carroll.jpg
Tennyson as photographed by Lewis Carroll in 1857

During 1854, when the United Kingdom was engaged in the Crimean War, Tennyson wrote several patriotic poems under various pseudonyms. Scholars speculate that Tennyson created his pen names because these verses used a traditional structure Tennyson employed in his earlier career but suppressed during the 1840s, [1] worrying that poems like "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (which he initially signed only A.T.) "might prove not to be decorous for a poet laureate". [2]

The poem was written after the Light Cavalry Brigade suffered great casualties in the Battle of Balaclava. Tennyson wrote the poem based on two articles published in The Times : the first, published on 13 November 1854, contained the sentence "The British soldier will do his duty, even to certain death, and is not paralyzed by the feeling that he is the victim of some hideous blunder," the last three words of which provided the inspiration for his phrase "Some one had blunder'd." [3] The poem was written in a few minutes on 2 December of the same year, based on a recollection of The Times's account; [4] Tennyson wrote other similar poems, like "Riflemen Form!", in a very similar manner. [5]

Later versions

Tennyson made revisions to the poem due to criticisms by the American poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and others; [6] these were published in Tennyson's volume Maud and Other Poems (1855). These changes were criticized by several, including both Tennyson and Tuckerman.[ citation needed ]

At the suggestion of Jane, Lady Franklin, Tennyson sent a thousand copies of a single-sheet version of the poem to be distributed among soldiers in the Crimea. [7] For this he rethought the revisions in Maud and Other Poems, and this rethought version was used for the second edition of Maud, in 1856. [8]

Tennyson recited this poem onto a wax cylinder in 1890.

Kipling's postscript

Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Last of the Light Brigade" (1891) some 40 years after the appearance of "The Charge of the Light Brigade". His poem focuses on the terrible hardships faced in old age by veterans of the Crimean War, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the Light Brigade. Its purpose was to shame the British public into offering financial assistance. [9] [ page needed ]

First draft

Cultural references


Related Research Articles

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The Crimean War was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between the Russian Empire and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom, and Sardinia-Piedmont.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfred, Lord Tennyson</span> British Poet Laureate (1809–1892)

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which remain some of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although described by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Battle of Balaclava</span> 1854 battle of the Crimean War

The Battle of Balaclava, fought on 25 October 1854 during the Crimean War, was part of the Siege of Sevastopol (1854–55), an Allied attempt to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, Russia's principal naval base on the Black Sea. The engagement followed the earlier Allied victory in September at the Battle of the Alma, where the Russian General Menshikov had positioned his army in an attempt to stop the Allies progressing south towards their strategic goal. Alma was the first major encounter fought in the Crimean Peninsula since the Allied landings at Kalamita Bay on 14 September, and was a clear battlefield success; but a tardy pursuit by the Allies failed to gain a decisive victory, allowing the Russians to regroup, recover and prepare their defence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan</span> British Army officer

George Charles Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan,, styled Lord Bingham before 1839, was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and British Army officer. He was one of three men, along with Captain Nolan and Lord Raglan, responsible for the fateful order during the Battle of Balaclava in October 1854 that led to the Light Brigade commander, The Earl of Cardigan, leading the Charge of the Light Brigade. He was subsequently promoted to field marshal.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Howard Russell</span> Irish journalist and war correspondent

Sir William Howard Russell, was an Irish reporter with The Times, and is considered to have been one of the first modern war correspondents. He spent 22 months covering the Crimean War, including the Siege of Sevastopol and the Charge of the Light Brigade. He later covered events during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the American Civil War, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War. His dispatches from Crimea to TheTimes are regarded as the world's first war correspondence.

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Lewis Edward Nolan, known to his family as Louis Nolan and in Austrian service as Ludwig Nolan was a British Army officer and cavalry tactician best known for his role and death in the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Born to a infantry officer and minor official and his wife, Nolan was educated at the Austrian Inhaber Pioneer School at Tulln, where he was noted as an enthusiastic horseman and military theorist. After early graduation he was commissioned as a subaltern in the 10th Austrian Hussar regiment, serving in Austria, Hungary and on the Polish frontier, where he again became known for his horsemanship and was promoted to senior lieutenant. Due to the nepotism in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, Nolan transferred to the British Army as a cornet in the 15th Light Dragoons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Yorke Scarlett</span> British general (1799–1871)

General Sir James Yorke Scarlett was a British Army officer and hero of the Crimean War who led the Charge of the Heavy Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854.

"The Last of the Light Brigade" is a poem written in 1890 by Rudyard Kipling echoing – thirty-six years after the event – Alfred Tennyson's famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. Employing synecdoche, Kipling uses his poem to expose the terrible hardship faced in old age by veterans of the Crimean War, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the light brigade who charged at the Battle of Balaclava. It describes a visit by the last twenty survivors of the charge to Tennyson to reproach him gently for not writing a sequel about the way in which England was treating its old soldiers. Some sources treat the poem as an account of a real event, but other commentators class the destitute old soldiers as allegorical, with the visit invented by Kipling to draw attention to the poverty in which the real survivors were living, in the same way that he evoked Tommy Atkins in "The Absent Minded Beggar".

<i>Flashman at the Charge</i>

Flashman at the Charge is a 1973 novel by George MacDonald Fraser. It is the fourth of the Flashman novels. Playboy magazine serialised Flashman at the Charge in 1973 in their April, May and June issues. The serialisation is unabridged, including most of the notes and appendixes and features a few illustrations, collages from various paintings and pictures to depict a period montage of the Charge and Crimea.

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<i>The Charge of the Light Brigade</i> (1936 film) 1936 film by Michael Curtiz

The Charge of the Light Brigade is a 1936 American historical adventure film from Warner Bros., starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. It was directed by Michael Curtiz and produced by Samuel Bischoff, with Hal B. Wallis as the executive producer. The film's screenplay is by Michael Jacoby and Rowland Leigh, from a story by Michael Jacoby, and based on the 1854 poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The music score was composed by Max Steiner, his first for Warner Bros., and the cinematography was by Sol Polito. Scenes were shot at the following California locations: Lone Pine, Sherwood Lake, Lasky Mesa, Chatsworth, and Sonora. The Sierra Nevada mountains were used for the Khyber Pass scenes.

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The Charge of the Light Brigade is a 1912 American silent historical drama film directed by J. Searle Dawley. Produced by Edison Studios, the film portrays the disastrous yet inspiring military attack in October 1854 by British light cavalry against Russian artillery positions in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. Director Dawley also wrote the scenario for this production, adapting it in part from the famous 1854 narrative poem about the charge by British poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who completed his poem just six weeks after the actual event. The film's action scenes and landscape footage were shot between late August and early September 1912, while Dawley and his company of players and crew were on location in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In order to produce a sizable and believable recreation of the charge, the director needed a very large number of horsemen. Fortunately for Dawley, the commander of United States Army cavalry at Fort D. A. Russell at Cheyenne agreed to provide "about 800" troopers and "their trained mounts" to the Edison project.

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References

  1. Francis 1976, p. 113.
  2. Shannon & Ricks 1985, p. 3.
  3. Shannon & Ricks 1985, p. 1.
  4. Shannon & Ricks 1985, p. 2.
  5. Francis 1976, p. 115.
  6. Shannon & Ricks 1985, p. 7.
  7. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson and annotated by Alfred Lord Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1908), II, 369; Shannon and Ricks 8.
  8. Shannon & Ricks 1985, pp. 10–11.
  9. Brighton, Terry (2013). Hell riders : the true story of the charge of the Light Brigade. New York. ISBN   978-1466859678. OCLC   864822057.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  10. "Iron Maiden". Ironmaidenbeer.com. Archived from the original on 26 August 2014. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  11. Douglas, Steven (7 April 2018). "Follow Top Gear's Incredible Road Trip Through Ukraine – Part 1". grandtournation.com. Retrieved 28 November 2023.
  12. "The Charge of the Light Brigade poem Top Gear". YouTube .

Bibliography