![]() Although he was writing at a remove of time and distance, Tennyson’s use of “wild” captures what Julian Spilsbury calls the “blood lust” of the Light Brigade Trooper Woodham, for instance, recalled that he cut Russian gunners down “like nine pins” in his exuberance at reaching the artillery (169). “Wild” can mean ardent and, in the context of war, suggests an eagerness for battle, with perhaps even overtones of savagery. Tennyson’s adjective “wild” is a complex term with many layers of meaning. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” called the event a “wild charge.” The word represents qualified praise because it betrays a certain uneasiness with the conduct of the cavalry, in keeping with the subtlety of Tennyson’s poem overall. It places the Light Brigade in a zone outside the comprehension of those who observed, wrote about, and read about the charge. This insistence on the madness of the Light Brigade subverts a wider discussion of whether the charge was suicidal and who should have been held accountable for the military debacle. Both the British and Russians who witnessed the charge suggested that, whilst brave, it could be viewed as lunacy and thus incomprehensible in rational terms. However, both British and Russian eyewitnesses also referred to the charge as an act of insanity as Markovits says, “madness and glory coalesce in Tennyson’s poem” ( Markovits para. The British blend of mourning and pride in reaction to the Light Brigade’s charge is well documented in Stefanie Markovits’s The Crimean War in the British Imagination and her BRANCH entry on the charge. Thomas Rommel has characterized this response as “the discrepancy between chivalric heroism and military incompetence,” which he finds to be a hallmark of poetry on the charge (110). As a result, even monuments to the Crimean War such as that in Waterloo Place or those in Sevastopol attest to loss as much as victory, and like the charge of the Light Brigade itself represent heroic failure.Īlthough Alfred, Lord Tennyson claimed that “all the world wondered” in his poem on the bravery of the charge of the Light Brigade, the event has always produced an ambivalent response, eliciting reactions poised between admiration for the heroism of the cavalry and grief at the senseless waste of life. Both the British and Russians had difficulty in coming to terms with this incident, as they did with the Crimean War as a whole, because it was neither wholly a victory nor defeat for either side. Russian cavalry officers were convinced that their British counterparts were brave but deranged “valiant lunatics” after witnessing the charge. Tennyson’s polyvocal term “wild” in particular holds in suspense both admiration and the suggestion that it was an insane act, which resonates with accounts by Russians on the receiving end of the charge. Even though he was writing at a remove of time and distance from the action, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem echoes the conflicted reactions of both British and Russian witnesses who characterized the charge both as heroic and an act of insanity. ![]() To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets around the world, click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.The charge of the Light Brigade has always elicited ambivalent responses from eyewitnesses. Perhaps, though, Wilfrid Owen still said it best, in terms of the relationship between poetry and war: ![]() Or to quote the allied French Marshal, Pierre Bosquet, at the time: “ C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” (“It is magnificent, but it is not war.”) He is said to have added: “ C’est de la folie” - “It is madness.” ![]() While it does stir the heart still, I also feel it is true to say that the poetry that arose out of World War 1, most notably of Wilfrid Owen marked a turning point: from then to now, poetry has focused far more on recording the reality of war, rather than celebrating doomed charges resulting in significant loss of life. The poem makes a virtue of necessity: that the soldiers knew they were doomed, but being required to obey orders, they charged anyway. The rider ‘for the past century” is critical, because I think the poetry arising out of World War 1 marked a real change from the poetry that had preceded it, which far more often celebrated the glory of war, even in the case of a suicidal change like that of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854 - also the year the poem was written and published. I’m currently featuring a series of poems for Tuesday themed around “war.” What I’ve said on past Tuesdays is: ” because I believe poetry often encapsulates the realism of war and has done so, in terms of modern poetry, for the past century.” ![]()
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