GCSE English Spec B - War Poetry

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE – ALFRED TENNYSON

• Crimean War → 1854 till 1856
• British cavalry commander mistook some orders to retake some guns held by the Russians. Instead he told his men to charge the main Russian position, at the head of the valley bristling with artillery
• 600 horsemen obeyed → 2/3 killed or wounded
• Charge → best known example of heroism and stupidity of war
• Tennyson → poet laureate
• Poem popular and famous as a study of glamour and futility of war
• Stanza 1 till 3 → charge towards Russians ‘into jaws of death’
• Stanza 4 till 5 → brigade reaches Russian guns, attacks gun crew with sabres
• Tennyson catches glamour without horror of the bloodshed
• Stanza 6 → Tennyson stands back to offer general comment on epic movement of war
• French general who watched charge said: ‘it is magnificent, but it is not war: it is folly’

COME UP FROM THE FIELDS FATHER – WALT WHITMAN

• His 1st war poems reflected general excitement about conflict in northern American cities
• After younger brother got wounded → attitudes changed
• Work as a ‘wound dresser’ → attitudes changed
• Imaginative writing about effects of war on a farming in Ohia
• Letter from Front tells them of bad news about their son, Pete

A WIFE IN LONDON

• Lonely woman waiting for news of her husband in South Africa
• Hardy is sympathetic to the woman and her cause
• Miniature version of one of his short stories
• Oblique view of wars suffering
• Showing a victim thousands of miles from the fighting

WAR – EDGAR WALLACE

• Wallace was first a army medical orderly
• Then became a war correspondent
• Poem set in an emergency field hospital near Front line
• Battle is on in the distance
• Doctor doing his best → help causalities
• Badly wounded man, massive injury, caused by a rebounded bullet

DIRGE OF THE DEAD SISTERS – RUDYARD KIPLING

• Kipling went to South Africa as a journalist during Boer war
• Grave supporter of military and British empire
• Had doubts as he watched effects of fighting
• Typhoid broke out in overcrowded town
• Women volunteered to be nurses who began to die themselves
• Subject of the poem → their courage and endurance

THE HYAENAS

• Reflects what he observed in India and South Africa
• Ugly scavengers dig up and eat buried soldiers
• It is their instinct → therefore not to blame
• Real target of anger seen in bitter concluding lines