Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)

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I’m fascinated by the concept of epic poetry, a literary genre originating in the mists of pre-literate societies, when bards of the time would compose and memorise traditional stories, and pass them on from performer to performer and performer to audience. The classic epic poems that come down to us from ancient history include the Epic of Gilgamesh (composed anywhere between 2500 and 1300 BC), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (8th century BC), the Mahabarata (5th century BC), and Virgil’s Aeneid (c.20 BC)…whilst from later medieval and early Renaissance years, we have the Old English Beowulf, the German Nibelungenlied, the French Song of Roland, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. All of them massively significant in the history of world literature.

What these epic narrative poems have in common is great length (the Iliad contains over 15,000 verse lines; the Mahabarata a whopping 200,000!), featuring vast settings and grand, sweeping themes, usually featuring a hero who participates in a quest or journey, performs great deeds, and generally embodies the ideal traits and moral values of the nation or culture from which the epic emanates. They also have in common the constraint of poetic meter, originally to help the bard recall the lines – in ancient Greek and Latin epic poetry it was dactylic hexameter that lent itself to the languages (dum-di-di dum-di-di); in Renaissance England, iambic pentameter (di-dum di-dum), beloved of Shakespeare of course.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost may not have an obvious hero (given that his “heroes”, in his two main narrative arcs, are Satan and Adam and Eve), but there’s no doubting the grand theme: Milton tackles the epic saga of the Fall of Man, the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Written across 10,000 lines of blank verse in iambic pentameter, Milton starts in media res (another characteristic of the epic, meaning in the midst of the plot with the background story being recounted later) with Satan and the other rebel angels defeated and banished to Hell.

The piece is a monumental and remarkable achievement, particularly given that by the late 1650s, when he started writing Paradise Lost, Milton had become blind and had to dictate the entire work to amanuenses. Milton saw himself as the intellectual heir of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, and sought to create a work of art which fully represented the most basic tenets of the Protestant faith. Like all epic poetry, with its length and archaic language, it’s a slog to read through (and I’m not recommending it), but there’s no doubting its influence down the ages.

Here are the opening lines where Milton lays out his intentions (to “justify the ways of God to men”):

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing heavenly muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos: Or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou Oh spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou knowest; thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the heighth of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

 

 

John Milton
Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias (1818)

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I first heard the classic phrase from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet – “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” – during one of Stuart Hall’s typically overblown football commentaries in the seventies, somehow managing to tie Shelley’s sublime lines to a gritty encounter between Everton and Spurs. The real deal, I found out later, concerns the fates of history, the ravages of time and the folly of hubris, rather than what was in fact a fifth consecutive nil-nil draw at Goodison Park (hence Hall was employing a certain degree of irony).

Percy Bysshe Shelley first published his sonnet in a January 1818 issue of The Examiner, a periodical that happened to be a champion of the young Romantic poets like Shelley, Keats and Byron. Shelley had written the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith. The two had spent Christmas 1817 together along with Shelley’s wife, Mary, when a sonnet-writing contest broke out, the subject being an Ancient Greek text which cited the inscription on a massive Ancient Egyptian statue:

“King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.”

So both Shelley and Smith wrote a poem called Ozymandias and in fact Smith’s poem was also published in The Examiner, a few weeks after Shelley’s sonnet. Both poems explore the themes I mentioned above and how the legacies of kings are fated to decay into oblivion.

In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum’s acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the 13th century BC. The 7.25-ton fragment of the statue’s head and torso was expected to arrive in London in 1818 and it’s a fair inference to assume that Shelley and Smith were inspired by this. So here’s Shelley’s famous poem, followed, should you wish to compare, by Horace Smith’s less well-known offering.

Incidentally, you will perhaps have twigged that this wasn’t the only time that an evening with the Shelleys spent concocting literary challenges would lead to a famous literary work: the previous winter, a similar evening spent discussing ghost stories led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

And Horace Smith’s poem…

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:-
‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone,
‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
‘The wonders of my hand.’- The City’s gone,-
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,-and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

 

Poetry

William Makepeace Thackeray’s Ballad of the Bouillabaisse (1855)

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What’s your favourite dish? If you were asked to choose your “last supper”, what would it be? For me, I would likely choose that classic Provençal seafood stew, bouillabaisse. I still keep, tucked into a Roux Brothers cookery book (that I see from the inner leaf came from my mum in Christmas 1988), a cut-out recipe for bouillabaisse that I have returned to many times over the years. My version is probably not authentic (to be so, it must apparently contain what the French call “rascasse” – i.e. scorpionfish – which tends not to be available at the Morrisons fish counter) but they say that recipes vary from family to family in Marseille anyway. At any rate, it’s a deeply rich and satisfying dish, and it goes down a treat. Like many a classic French dish (think pot au feu, cassoulet, bœuf bourguignon…) bouillabaisse has a noble charm to it and there’s a giant of 19th century literature, William Makepeace Thackeray, who agrees with me.

You may know of William Thackeray from his classic novel, Vanity Fair, but he was also responsible for many an amusing verse. He was, by all accounts, a really funny guy; Trollope said of him: “he rarely uttered a word, either with his pen or his mouth, in which there was not an intention to reach our sense of humour”. This poem, The Ballad of the Bouillabaisse, from his 1855 collection of verse, Ballads, is typical: a wonderfully crafted and charming tribute to the noble dish, of which Thackeray was clearly a fan from his many years residing in Paris.

When one day I am next in Paris, or Marseille, I’d like to think I might find an establishment suitably similar to that conjured up in Thackeray’s poem, find a table in a nook, and order a steaming bowl of bouillabaisse and a bottle of “the Chambertin with yellow seal”. For, as Thackeray says, “true philosophers…should love good victuals and good drinks”. Failing the realisation of that dream, however, I still have my trusty old recipe.

Read the poem below as you (here’s a treat!) listen to your blogger reciting the poem whilst backed by some glorious French accordion music. Best enjoyed when hungry…

A street there is in Paris famous,
For which no rhyme our language yields,
Rue Neuve des petits Champs its name is—
The New Street of the Little Fields;
And here ’s an inn, not rich and splendid,
But still in comfortable case—
The which in youth I oft attended,
To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse.

This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is—
A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo;
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace;
All these you eat at Terrés tavern,
In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.

Indeed, a rich and savory stew ’t is;
And true philosophers, methinks,
Who love all sorts of natural beauties,
Should love good victuals and good drinks.
And Cordelier or Benedictine
Might gladly, sure, his lot embrace,
Nor find a fast-day too afflicting,
Which served him up a Bouillabaisse.

I wonder if the house still there is?
Yes, here the lamp is as before;
The smiling, red-cheeked écaillère is
Still opening oysters at the door.
Is Terré still alive and able?
I recollect his droll grimace
He’d come and smile before your table,
And hop’d you lik’d your Bouillabaisse.

We enter; nothing’s changed or older.
“How’s Monsieur Terré, waiter, pray?”
The waiter stares and shrugs his shoulder;—
“Monsieur is dead this many a day.”
“It is the lot of saint and sinner.
So honest Terré ’s run his race!”
“What will Monsieur require for dinner?”
“Say, do you still cook Bouillabaisse?

“Oh, oui, Monsieur,” ’s the waiter’s answer;
“Quel vin Monsieur désire-t-il?”
“Tell me a good one.” “That I can, sir;
The Chambertin with yellow seal.”
“So Terré’s gone,” I say and sink in
My old accustom’d corner-place;
“He’s done with feasting and with drinking,
With Burgundy and Bouillabaisse.”

My old accustom’d corner here is—
The table still is in the nook;
Ah! vanish’d many a busy year is,
This well-known chair since last I took.
When first I saw ye, Cari luoghi,
I’d scarce a beard upon my face,
And now a grizzled, grim old fogy,
I sit and wait for Bouillabaisse.

Where are you, old companions trusty
Of early days, here met to dine?
Come, waiter! quick, a flagon crusty—
I’ll pledge them in the good old wine.
The kind old voices and old faces
My memory can quick retrace;
Around the board they take their places,
And share the wine and Bouillabaisse.

There’s Jack has made a wondrous marriage;
There’s laughing Tom is laughing yet;
There’s brave Augustus drives his carriage;
There’s poor old Fred in the Gazette;
On James’s head the grass is growing:
Good Lord! the world has wagg’d apace
Since here we set the Claret flowing,
And drank, and ate the Bouillabaisse.

Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a time that’s gone,
When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting,
In this same place—but not alone.
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face look’d fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smil’d to cheer me.
—There’s no one now to share my cup.

I drink it as the Fates ordain it.
Come, fill it, and have done with rhymes;
Fill up the lonely glass, and drain it
In memory of dear old times.
Welcome the wine, whate’er the seal is;
And sit you down and say your grace
With thankful heart, whate’er the meal is.
—Here comes the smoking Bouillabaisse!

A bouillabaisse I made!
William Makepeace Thackeray
Poetry

W B Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888)

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Ten years ago, Sal and I had a weekend break in Knock in County Mayo, Ireland, during which we took a pleasant side trip to Sligo and “Yeats country”. In those days I was into “collecting” literary graves and we took the opportunity to visit Yeats’ final resting place, which turned out to be situated in a glorious setting at Drumcliff, under the imposing Benbulbin rock formation. William Butler Yeats was of course one of the foremost twentieth century English language poets, and in Sligo they’re rightly proud of him.

Benbulben

I confess to not having read much Yeats, but there are two of his poems in particular that have resonated with me from old. One is his evocative rendering of the Greek myth, Leda and the Swan, and the other is this, the twelve-line lyric poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1888 when he was a young man, living in London and feeling lonely and homesick. The 1880s had seen the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement in Ireland and developments there had had a profound effect on Yeats’ poetry, informed by his subsequent explorations of Irish identity. The Lake Isle of Innisfree is about a yearning for his childhood home (the isle of Innisfree is a real place, an uninhabited island in Lough Gill, where Yeats spent many of his childhood summers). It is a place of serenity and simplicity, and to we, the reader, that place becomes not Innisfree, but wherever we happen to picture our own rural hideaway; the place to which we pretend we shall one day escape and leave behind our current manic, urban lives (“on the pavement grey”).

The Lake Isle represents an escape, a poet’s vision of a romantic, idyllic, and timeless way of life. I love the way he evokes the tranquil life, in the bosom of nature, in that masterfully simple phrase wherein he says he will “live alone in the bee-loud glade”. How effectively this conjures up a picture of a hot sunny day alive with the hum of insects!

Of course, such an ambition rarely comes to pass and it remains for most of us a fanciful idea. Indeed, Yeats died in France and only returned to Sligo in a coffin. But his poem remains a great favourite with the Irish (it’s quoted in Irish passports) and to romantics everywhere who yearn for tranquillity and “hear it in the deep heart’s core”.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

William Butler Yeats
Poetry

Wilfrid Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est (1917)

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“Who’s for the game?”

“Who’s for the trench – Are you, my laddie?”

These are words from poems by Jessie Pope, poet and propagandist well-known for her patriotic and motivational poetry that was originally published in the Daily Mail to encourage enlistment at the beginning of the Great War. Another poem renowned for expressing the patriotic ideals that characterised pre-war England was Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, a sonnet in which Brooke speaks in the guise of an English soldier as he is leaving home to go to the Great War. It portrays death for one’s country as a noble end and England as the noblest country for which to die:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England

Or, as the Roman lyrical poet, Horace, had it in his Odes: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (How sweet and honourable it is to die for one’s country).

Later, however, when the grim realities of the war had set in, Wilfrid Owen chose to express in his poetry a very different kind of sentiment, and when he wrote this poem whilst recovering from shell-shock in a hospital near Edinburgh in 1917, he borrowed from Horace’s phrase for his title: Dulce et decorum est.

No jingoism here, no rose-tinted romanticism nor noble ideals. This poem speaks instead from Owen’s direct experience; a vignette from the trenches, where the gruesome effects of a chlorine gas attack are described in compelling detail. It makes for grim reading. Wilfrid Owen, who dedicated this poem to Jessie Pope herself (I wonder how that went down?), at least provides us with an artistry of words in this description of the horror of the front line. But he reminds us that, were we to experience first-hand the reality of war, we may hesitate to repeat platitudes such as Horace’s “old Lie”.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

 

Wilfrid Owen
Poetry

Robert Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix (1845)

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In 490 BC, the Athenian army defeated the invading Persian army in a battle on the plain of Marathon, roughly 26 miles north of Athens. According to legend, and brought down to us via the writings of Herodotus, Lucian and Plutarch, the Athenians then ordered the messenger Pheidippides to run ahead to Athens and announce the victory to the city. Pheidippides raced back to the city in the intense late summer heat. Upon reaching the Athenian agora, he exclaimed “Rejoice! We conquer” and then collapsed dead from exhaustion.

This trope, of the long distance chase to deliver vital news, we see again in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride (1860). This told the (highly embroidered) tale of Paul Revere’s valiant ride to Concord to warn the militia that the British were coming, thus promoting him in American culture to the status of hero and patriot of the American Revolution.

In the same spirit – though this time wholly imaginary – is Robert Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. The poem is a first-person narrative told, in breathless galloping meter, by one of three riders, only one of whose horses, the narrator’s brave Roland, survives to fulfil the epic quest. The midnight errand is urgent — “the news which alone could save Aix from her fate” — but what that good news actually is, is never revealed. The sequence of towns flashing by between Ghent and Aix-la-Chapelle is true to life, though they are characterised only by the associated times of night, dawn, and day (also a feature of Paul Revere’s Ride) as the narrator charges through them.

This poem is one of my earliest memories of poetry, from schooldays, and its rollicking movement and sense of adventure resonates with me now as it did then. There is a recording of Browning himself reciting the poem on an 1889 Edison cylinder, but it’s far too crackly for our purposes, and besides, he forgets the lines and gives up after the first verse (“I’m terribly sorry but I cannot remember me own verses”) so instead I offer this more modern and professional version!

 

Robert Browning
Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (1845)

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The Raven is a narrative poem by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1845, famous for its dramatic, Gothic quality. The scene is set from the beginning: the unnamed narrator is in a lonely apartment on a “bleak December” night, with little more than a dying fire to light the room, when he hears an eerie tapping from outside his chamber door. Into the darkness he whispers, “Lenore,” hoping his lost love has come back, but all that could be heard was “an echo [that] murmured back the word ‘Lenore!'”. The tapping persisting, he opens the window whereupon the mysterious raven enters the room and perches atop a sculptured bust above his door.

The man asks the raven for his name, and surprisingly it answers, croaking “Nevermore.” The man knows that the bird does not speak from reason, but has been taught by “some unhappy master,” and that the word “nevermore” is its only response. Thus, he asks a series of questions, all eliciting the stock response at the end of each stanza.

Poe was very interested in expressing melancholy in poetic form. As he wrote in Graham’s Magazine in 1846: “Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” – the answer, of course, Death. And when is Death most poetical? “When it most closely allies itself to beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”. Hence, the poem is about the despair of a bereaved lover, and Poe’s use of the raven – that bird of ill-omen – does little to suggest that a happy outcome is forthcoming! Perhaps the raven stands for the narrator’s subconscious as he struggles with the concepts of death and finality.

There is a lilting rhythm in play; it’s melodic as well as dramatic (and since you ask, it’s in trochaic octameter, with eight stressed-unstressed two-syllable feet per lines). There is frequent use of internal rhyme, and much repetition of rhyming around the “or” sound (Lenore, door, lore, nevermore).

Who better to narrate this great poem than the prince of horror himself, Vincent Price? Here he is in wonderful Gothic form, narrating, indeed acting, this dark classic…superb.

Edgar Allan Poe
Film, TV, and Theatre, Poetry

W H Auden’s Night Mail (1936)

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In the 1930s, a group of British filmmakers, led by John Grierson, under the aegis of the GPO Film Unit, was behind an influential output of documentary films that became known as the British Documentary Film Movement. Of the films it produced, the best known and most critically acclaimed was Harry Watt’s and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), featuring music by Benjamin Britten and poetry by W H Auden. Auden wrote his poem especially for the documentary, which follows the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland. The poem acts as a sort of verse commentary over the footage of the steam locomotive, and helped to establish the documentary as something of a classic.

Auden’s language is ingenious; glorious use of metaphor and clever rhymes, four-beat lines rhythmically delivered to mimic the pumping of the rods and pistons of the locomotive. You can almost hear the train chugging along. The personified train is efficient, reliable, steadfast, trustworthy – there is a remit, after all, to sell the merits of the postal service, and Auden satisfies the spec. As the pace picks up to match the acceleration of the train, the rhymes become quick and punchy, and become internal rhymes (Letters of thanks, letters from banks) rather than line-end rhymes; a rapper’s delight.

And read along here:

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to the Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Auden and Britten
Poetry

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, 1854

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It’s 25th October 1854, and the Battle of Balaclava, one of the pivotal battles of the Crimean War, is in full flow. Lord Raglan, commander of the British forces, has sent a message ordering the approximately 600 horsemen of the British light cavalry (the “Light Brigade”) to pursue and harry a retreating Russian artillery battery. Disastrously, however, due to a miscommunication in the chain of command, the Light Brigade is instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one very much well-prepared and defended.

The Light Brigade comes under withering fire from three sides, is badly mauled, and is forced to retreat in chaos. The assault ends with very high British casualties, no decisive gains, and the event goes down in history as one of the most woeful of military blunders…

Just six weeks after the event, Alfred, Lord Tennyson published his narrative poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. Its lines emphasise the valour of the cavalry in bravely carrying out their orders, regardless of the obvious outcome. The poem bequeaths to us the famous phrase:

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die

Nowadays, we casually use the phrase “ours not to reason why” to shrug away a dubious managerial decision. In the poem, however, we are left in no doubt as to what the soldiers were committing themselves to:

Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the 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

The metrical scheme of the poem lends itself to the desperate charge of the horsemen, the breathlessly short lines, drummed out like hoof-beats, creating a dramatic immediacy. Phrases like “jaws of Death” and “mouth of Hell” vividly depict the hopelessness of the assault.

Read it in full (as you listen to it here)

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade

I
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.

II
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

III
Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the 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.

IV
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.

V
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 the six hundred.

VI
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!

Tennyson
Painting by Richard Caton Woodville, 1894

 

Survivors of the charge