The poem that I shall look at first is ‘The charge of the light brigade’ by Alfred Tennyson.
Tennyson´s poem is a celebration of the bravery of the six hundred British troops who went into battle against all odds, even though they knew that they would be killed. The poem immediately starts with action
‘Half a league, half a league
Half a league onward´
These first couple of lines straight away create a wonderful rhythm to the poem which imitates the horses galloping.
Tennyson creates a vivid impression of the bravery of the soldiers through his use of verbs.
‘Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there´
The daring command in verse 1, which is repeated for effect in verse 2, sweeps the reader along without time to question the uselessness of the command
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
‘Charge for the guns!´
He uses phases like ‘the valley of Death´, ‘the jaws of Death´, ‘the mouth of Hell’ to describe the fate that awaits these men. He does not convey the gory reality of war.
Tennyson creates a feeling of excitement with his use of poetic devices, such as repetition:
‘Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them´,
and alliteration
‘Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell´
In the final verse Tennyson creates a sense of the immortality of the soldiers bravery with a rhetorical question and commands
‘When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made! …
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!´
The repetition of ‘the six hundred´ at the end of each verse reminds the reader of the enormous loss of life, but at the end of the poem they have become the ‘Noble six hundred´ and are famous.
I will now look at ‘Come up from the fields father’ This poem contrasts with ‘Charge of the light brigade’ as the first poem was about what happens on the front line to people directly involved in the fighting. Whereas in this poem the writer focuses on the people left at home, he writes imaginatively about the effects of war on a farming family in Ohio.
The writer starts the poem by setting the scene, he gives the reader the impression that the farm is quite rich and prosperous and shows the family going about there normal duties. In the first few lines there is a sense of quietness which is shown in how the writer creates the atmosphere.
“All is calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well”
After the nice gentle start to this poem the mood suddenly changes when a letter arrives. There becomes a sense of urgency and panic.
“Fast as she can she hurries”
This completely contrasts with the description of the fields and what the day is like.
Additionally we also learn by expressions such as ‘ominous’ that the mother can sense something is wrong she has a feeling that this letter brings bad news.
The poem reinforces the sense of panic when the family realise that the letter has not been written by their son it is a stranger’s handwriting.
“o this is not our sons writing, yet his name is sign’d”
The next poem I looked at was ‘Drummer Hodge’ written by Thomas Hardy. In his local Dorset newspaper, Hardy read of the death of a drummer boy born in a village near Dorchester. He decided to use the word ‘Hodge’ (meaning a country bumpkin) to express in his poem the sadness of a boy, too young to understand war, buried thousands of miles from home on an alien landscape.
The opening lines to this poem are extremely effective. The forceful words ‘throw in’, ‘uncoffined’ and even ‘they’ convey the coldness of the burial. Too time-consuming to ceremonially lay to rest each corpse they are tossed in ‘just as found’. Straight away the reader gets the impression that they don’t care about the dead boy, you just get thrown into a grave. The lines portray that once dead they no longer see you as a person just a body.
‘They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found’
During this poem the reader starts to feel very sad as we learn through lines such as
‘Young Hodge the Drummer never knew
fresh from his Wessex home’
That this young boy actually doesn’t understand why or what he was fighting for during his war service in South Africa.
Hardy also uses several African words in this poem such as ‘kopje crest, karoo and gloam’. This is most effective as it helps convey the strangeness of this place to this young boy.
The last lines of this poem
‘And strange eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally’
are incredibly powerful and effective as they make the reader feel a lot of sorrow and pity for they boy as they describe how the boy will be eternally lonely. Since he has been buried on foreign soil on land he doesn’t no.
The next poem I will look at in ‘A wife in London’ by Walt Witman
In conclusion, war brings a great deal of pain and suffering so it shouldn’t be under-estimated. Wilfred Owen, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Tennyson and Walt Whitman all bring across the reality behind war and the torture, pain and suffering it brings with it. Personally my favourite out of the three is “Dulce et Decorum est” as I know it’s a true account of what happened in the war because Wilfred Owen was a soldier and died in action. I thought this poem contained a lot of discomfort and misery making it more out of the ordinary and real.
