Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade
We will discuss the presence of the Victorians in general, and this poem in particular, in Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse (1927) in our Virginia Woolf Season. Live online lecture and seminar with Trudi Tate, 4 December 2021.
Update 2023: we study this poem in our 2023 Victorian Season. Lecture on Tennyson and the Crimean War by Trudi Tate.
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The Charge of the Light Brigade
The Charge of the Light Brigade took place at the Battle of Balaklava, 25 October 1854. The first reports appeared in The Times on 13 and 14 November 1854. Tennyson was moved by the newspaper reports, and wrote the poem in early December (not immediately, as is sometimes claimed). It was published in The Examiner in December 1854. See further reading, below.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-92)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854)
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd.
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not,
Not the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!
Links and references
Listen to Adrian Poole reading 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', Cambridge English Faculty website, November 2009.
Listen to a discussion of the poem on ‘In Our Time’, BBC Radio. Trudi Tate, Saul David and Mike Broers joined Melvyn Bragg on 10 January 2008.
You can see a copy of the original publication of the poem in The Examiner, 9 December 1854, on the British Library website. Tennyson revised the poem several times; there are a few different versions in different publications.
For detailed discussions of this poem, see:
• Edgar Shannon and Christopher Ricks, ‘“The Charge of the Light Brigade”: The Creation of a Poem’, Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), rpt in Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edn (Macmillan, 1989).
• 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 University Press, 2003).
• Trudi Tate, A Short History of the Crimean War (I. B. Tauris, 2019).
