Explore the ways in which the poets communicate ideas of duty and honour in Charge of the Light Brigade and Vita Lampada

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Explore the ways in which the poets communicate ideas of duty and honour in Charge of the Light Brigade and Vitaï Lampada

In this essay I am going to explore the ways in which both poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Newbolt communicate duty and honour in their poems Charge of the Light Brigade, and Vitaï Lampada, respectively.

In Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, he describes the futility of the charge of the heavily outnumbered British Troops as they charge the strategically superior and better armed Russian Army. It is clear that whilst Tennyson considered the charge to be a mistake, he clearly felt that the British soldiers acted with honour and fully observed their duty to the Crown and Country by going through with the battle and on to almost certain death.

Henry Newbolt’s poem Vitai Lampada, which means ‘Beacon of light’, is in three stanzas. The theme of honour and duty run through all three but with different ways of interpreting it. For example, the first stanza deals with a cricket match. Cricket is considered to be a noble and honourable game played by gentlemen. In the game, the eleven players go into bat against the opposition, with each dismissed player being replaced by another until their last man is in. In other words, they keep the battle going until the last man falls. Each team member has a contribution to make to the overall team result, be it a win or a loss. Each member plays honourably, by the rules, and plays for the good of his team. In the second stanza, we see a battle being played out in which everything seems to be going wrong, but the soldiers keep going to the bitter end, fighting honourable and with a great sense of duty. Finally, in the third stanza, which talks about a remembrance service in which a school boy is talking about the honour of fighting and dying for your country, the first two stanzas are tied together and we see the link clearly.

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Many war poets wrote about the bravery of the soldiers involved, particularly when out numbered as in these poems or out done in the strength of their armoury, but were critical of the necessity of the battle itself or of the war which they often passionately felt was futile. And in these two poems we can see that the poets felt just like this.

Both poems use repetition to allow the audience to remember what is being said in the poems. For example, in the Charge of the Light Brigade, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, repeats the ...

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