Show how the anti-war poetry by Wilfred Owen dispels the myth of triumph and heroism portrayed by Alfred Lord Tennyson in ‘The charge of the light brigade.’

War poetry was very common during times of conflict. Most poets wrote from home using secondary evidence e.g. Alfred Lord Tennyson composed his poem as a result of reading a war correspondents account on the battle of Balaclava. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" recalls a disastrous historical military engagement that took place during the initial phase of the Crimean War the subject of this poem is a tactical blunder; Lord Raglan sent desperate orders to his Light Cavalry Brigade, finally, one of his orders was acted upon, and the brigade began charging--but in the wrong direction! Over 650 men rushed forward, and well over 100 died within the next few minutes.

Few war poets actually witnessed what happened, one who did though was Wilfred Owen. Owen was drafted during the 1st world war he was sent to France in 1917 where he experienced the worst war winter. He first saw action at Serre where he and half his platoon occupied a German bunker. A shell landed outside and blinded the soldier on sentry duty-this incident inspired his poem ‘The Sentry’. After battle experience, thoroughly shocked by the horrors of war he was diagnosed as having shell shock (neurasthenia) and went to Craig Lockhart war hospital. As a form of therapy patients were encouraged to pursue their pre-war interests and Owen turned to poetry. It was in Craig Lockhart where Owen wrote ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ and ‘Dulce et decorum est’.

By examining the charge of the light brigade composed by Alfred Lord Tennyson and three of Owen’s works – ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ ‘The Sentry’ and ‘Dulce et decorum est’ it becomes clear that the two poets deal with the concept of war in their writing in two contrasting ways. In general Tennyson tends to illustrate war as a deed of bravery and fortitude on behalf of the loyal soldiers, whilst Owen with his graphic representations and cynical depiction of war eludicates the pointlessness of conflict. I am going to compare and contrast the poems and explore the different views of war of Owen and Tennyson. Tennyson's patriotic poem epitomised the glorification of war that Owen so despised.

‘Anthem for doomed youth’ is an elegy, a lament for the dead; it is a judgement of war based on Owen’s experience itself. The title portrays the actual meaning of the poem: ‘doomed’ ‘youth’ the young boys, not yet men, of the country were doomed, condemned.’ ‘Dulce et decorum est’ (a Latin phrase meaning it is sweet and decorous to die for ones country) is an ironic title, its intention is not so much to induce pity as to shock, especially the civilians sitting at home who hold on strongly to the traditional beliefs that war is noble and glorious. Beliefs such as these were common in war poetry and world war one was the first occasion when a dramatic change was marked in poetry. Owen being one of the main poets to change poetry dealt with the grim reality of war in his work, Owen’s poems effectively exemplify the futility of antagonism, whereas Tennyson being an earlier poet (pre 20th century) glorifies war in his poetry. The glorification of war means to elevate it to such a position that the soldiers who are participating in it believe that it is a heroic, loyal deed to give up ones life for their country.

In ‘The charge of the light brigade’ Tennyson manages to turn the sucicidal charge into an act of bravery even though many men lost their lives in pointless sacrifices. The dominant aspect of Tennyson’s composition is the glorious nature of what was accomplished by the soldiers (even though little was achieved), not the sadness of the lives lost. Whereas the dominant aspect of Owen’s poetry is the worthlessness and grief of the lives lost. Tennyson glosses over the brutality, the wastefulness, the death and the bleakness of conflict instead he venerates war and turns it into an undertaking of heroism and triumph.

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Stanza one in ‘Dulce et decorum est’ sets the scene; the soldiers are limping back from the Front, an appalling picture expressed through simile and metaphor. Such is the men’s wretched condition that they can be compared to old beggars, hags (ugly old women). ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags’ yet they were young! Barely awake from lack of sleep, their once smart uniforms resembling sacks, they cannot walk straight as their blood-caked feet try to negotiate the mud. ‘Blood-shod’ seems a dehumanising image- we think of horses shod not men. This method of dehumanising the soldiers is also used in Anthem for doomed youth which opens with the simile ‘die as cattle’ this jolts us with its image of the slaughterhouse and the idea of men being treated as less than human, no better than animals. Tennyson also mentions animals ‘while horse and hero fell’ but in a different way it adds a sentimental value to his poem.

In the second stanza (Dulce et decorum est) the pace changes rapidly with the use of direct speech deliberately designed to illustrate the panic, ‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!’ Wilfred Owen uses a simile to compare the feeling of what it was like to be caught in the brutality of war with the helpless sensation of being burnt by either flames or quicklime; ‘like a man in fire or lime’. The dropping of gas shells is mentioned in all four poems illustrating the dominance of them in war. Gas shells dropping softly suggests a menace stealthy and devilish in ‘Dulce et decorum est’. In ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ the juxtaposition of ‘choirs’ and ‘wailing shells’ is a startling metaphor, God’s world and the Devil’s both as one. Atmosphere is heightened in ‘The Sentry’ by a form of personification which is the practice of attributing human emotions to inanimate objects in line two, ‘Shell on frantic shell’ and the whizz-bangs that ‘found our door at last’ (line 11) both add a layer of malevolence to the enemy action. In ‘The charge of the light brigade’ the 600 soldiers were assaulted by the shots of shells of canons in front and on both sides of them. Still, they rode courageously forward toward their own deaths: ‘into the jaws of Death / into the mouth of hell / Rode the six hundred.’ The world marvelled at the courage of the soldiers; indeed, their glory is undying: the poem states these noble 600 men remain worthy of honour and tribute today. We can see that Tennyson is making heroes of the soldiers as they rode on while shells were dropping whereas in Owen’s poems the soldiers hid from the shells giving the impression that they were perhaps cowards. This is another example of the glorification of war in Tennyson’s poem.

In stanza two of ‘Dulce et decorum est’ the action focuses on one man who couldn’t get his gas helmet on in time. Lines 12-14 consist of a powerful underwater metaphor, with succumbing to poison gas being compared to drowning. ‘Floundering’ is what they’re already doing (in the mud) but here it takes on more gruesome implications as Owen introduces himself into the action through witnessing his comrade dying in agony.

In Stanza three from straight description Owen looks back from a new perspective in the light of a recurring nightmare. Those haunting flares in stanza 1 foreshadowed a more terrible haunting in which a friend, dying, ‘plunges at me’ before ‘my helpless sight’, an image Owen will not forget.

If only they might experience Owen’s own ‘smothering dreams’ which replicate in small measure the victim’s sufferings. Those sufferings Owen goes on to describe in sickening detail. Owen is making a very conscious attack on those people at home who uphold the war’s continuance unaware of its realities and on the injustice of young men being drawn into war. It is a direct challenge to manipulation through media, literature (pro-war poetry) and propaganda. It is an appeal to those who glorify war, those like Tennyson. The words used in the second stanza of ‘The charge of the light brigade’ ‘Not tho' the soldier knew/ Some one had blunder'd:/Their's not to make reply, /Their's not to reason why, / Their's but to do and die: portray heroism against all odds. However while lauding the chivalry of the noble six hundred he makes no attempt to downplay the pointlessness of the charge itself. It becomes clear in this stanza that Tennyson is manipulating history. He is making a military disaster into an act of courage and virtue. This type of poetry was common in Tennyson’s time and partly facilitated war, as it was a very important form of propaganda. In ‘The Charge of the light brigade’ Not a single soldier was discouraged or distressed by the command to charge forward, even though all the soldiers realized that their commander had made a terrible mistake: ‘Someone had blundered.’ The role of the soldier is to obey and ‘not to make reply...not to reason why,’ so they followed orders and rode into the ‘valley of death.’ The ‘you’ who Owen addresses in line 17 of ‘Dulce et decorum est’ implies the people who he is attacking, he is making a direct plea for empathy to the reader.

There are echoes everywhere in Owen and with ‘bitter as the cud’, we are back with ‘those who die as cattle’ (‘Anthem for doomed youth’).

In the last stanza of Dulce et decorum est Wilfred Owen personally accuses his reader, challenging his or her thinking by directly addressing the reader, insisting that seeing what he has seen would change the readers’ ideas the sweetness and meetness of dying for one’s country he denounces as a lie which children should never be exposed to. ‘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.’ Owen is saying that the reality is that it is not a sweet and glorious thing to die for one’s country’.

In ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ the octet contains a catalogue of the sounds of war, the weapons of destruction – guns, rifles, shells – linked, ironically, to religious imagery. These religious images: passing bells, orisons (prayers), voice of mourning, choirs, candles, holy glimmers, symbolise the sanctity of life – and death – while suggesting also the inadequacy, the futility, even meaninglessness, of organised religion measured against such a cataclysm as war. Religious images and allusions also dominate lines 9-14. Forget about altar boys and candle bearers, says Owen. These have nothing to do with the real rites. Look in their eyes and in the ashen faces of their womenfolk to learn the truth about war. ‘Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.’ Owen feels that it is an insult to the soldiers to have prayers; he doesn’t want false heroism because he feels it is a mockery. In line eight we switch from the fighting front to Britain’s ‘sad shires’ where loved ones mourn. The tone now drops from bitter passion to rueful contemplation, the mood sombre, the pace slower, until by line fourteen the poem quietly closes with ‘the drawing down of blinds’.

In the fourth stanza of ‘The charge of the light brigade the valiant image of the soldiers is once again depicted. The British soldiers were outnumbered by far but they still went ahead and did what they set out to do. They plunged through killing as many opponents as they could whilst their fellow soldiers were falling all around them. ‘Charging an army, while/All the world wonder’d:/ Plunged in the battery-smoke/
Right thro' the line they broke;’ All six hundred of them fought valiantly and the soldiers who died, died bravely in pursuit of freedom, a just and holy cause. ‘They that had fought so well’

The parallels with ‘Dulce et decorum est’ and ‘The sentry’ are quite noticeable. As in ‘Dulce et decorum est’ a young soldier suffers a tragic fate in horrifying circumstances and in Owen’s presence. Remembering how the war preyed on Owen’s mind to the extent that he experienced nightmares, a symptom of the condition for which he was treated at Craig Lockhart –‘In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me……….’(‘Dulce et decorum est’) ‘Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids’/ Watch my dreams still…. / I try not to remember these things now.’ (‘The sentry’) In both poems Owen shows us men under unendurable stress. Like the men in ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ who ‘die as cattle’, these are herded from the blast. A whine is one of the least manly of sounds but our sentry, all shreds of dignity lost, whines, ‘O, sir, - my eyes, - ‘. He sobs, needs, child-like, to be coaxed, which also points to another of war’s features – the paternal role of the junior officer.

The poem opens almost conversationally, though with understated menace in ‘and he knew’. But this is an occasion when Owen will not draw back from presenting truth in its most graphic form and relentlessly unveils the full scale of war’s horrors. The graphic language is designed to shock. Owen also makes strong use of playing on your senses both audial and visual e.g. ’Those other wretches how they bled and spewed’ (The Sentry) ‘If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs’ (Dulce et decorum est). One of his techniques is to make use of onomatopoeia. A succession of identical vowel sounds (u): ‘buffeting’, ‘snuffing’, ‘thud’, ‘flump’, ‘thumping’, ‘pummelled’, ‘crumps’ which suggest hard-hitting assault and battery and ruthless punishment. We also find ‘mud’, ‘ruck’ (repeated), heavy, ugly words that match the situation. Then, ‘shrieking air’ to denote both the sound of bombs and the terror that goes with it. How powerfully Owen conveys the conditions they live – and – die under. ‘Waterfalls of slime’ (line 4) is almost an oxymoron, for our notion of a waterfall is surely of a pure, clear cascade. We see ‘the steps too thick with clay to climb’ (line 6) and that awful olfactory image, ‘What murk of air remained stank old, and sour.’ (Line 7).

The last line of ‘the sentry’ ‘I see your lights! – But ours had long gone out’ makes a terrifying conclusion, not only underlining the personal tragedy but on a wider front reminding us of the famous words of Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of war:

“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

In the sixth stanza of ‘The charge of the light brigade’ a rhetorical question is asked – ‘When can their glory fade?’ by asking this Tennyson is implying that their glory can never fade and that the whole world is impressed by their bravery, they will never be forgotten. Tennyson immortalized the members of the light brigade and their deeds in this poem. He made the poem impersonal through the use of large numbers of soldiers ‘the six hundred’. The reader cannot become emotionally involved with the tragedy of the death of a single person instead they remember the courageousness of the unit ‘Honour the charge they made! /Honour the Light Brigade,’ this also helps to glorify war. However in ‘The sentry’ Owen talks about an individual man’s death this is done deliberately so the reader will become emotionally involved and therefore share in the horror of war.

‘The charge of the light brigade’ makes use of anaphora, in which the same word is repeated at the beginning of several consecutive lines: ‘Cannon to right of them / Cannon to left of them / Cannon in front of them.’ Here the method creates a sense of unrelenting assault; at each line our eyes meet the word ‘cannon,’ just as the soldiers meet their flying shells at each turn. This poem is effective largely because of the way it conveys the movement and sound of the charge via a strong, repetitive falling meter: ‘Half a league, half a league / Half a league onward.’ The repetition is designed to mimic the horses and horsemen going into battle, this is effective because it helps the reader visualize the setting. The plodding pace of the repetitions seems to subsume all individual impulsiveness in ponderous collective action. The poem does not speak of individual troops but rather of ‘the six hundred’ and then ‘all that was left of them.’

Therefore by studying the different writing techniques of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Wilfred Owen I was able to show how the anti-war poetry by Owen dispelled the myth of triumph and heroism portrayed by Tennyson in ‘The charge of the light brigade.’ Tennyson wrote his poem as a celebration of the heroic soldiers in the Light Brigade who fell in service to their commander and their cause. The poem glorifies war and courage, even in cases of complete inefficiency and waste. The poem as it stands today is a moving tribute to courage and heroism in the face of devastating defeat. However Owen’s poems – ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ ‘The Sentry’ and ‘Dulce et decorum est’ show the reality of war and the fierce brutality of what happened to many, many young innocent soldiers.