To compare ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ with ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’
In this essay we are going to be comparing two war poems. They are ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) and ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ by Lord Byron (1788-1824).
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is set in the Crimean war. It is about the British cavalry getting the wrong orders and going straight at the enemy’s cannons. ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ is a biblical story. The story tells us about a whole army being wiped out really quickly as they slept by the ‘Angel of Death’.
The first poem we are going to look at is ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). In this poem Tennyson describes the valley that the cavalry had to gallop along as ‘The Valley of Death’. This makes you think that as they go along the valley the soldiers will die. He describes the soldiers as heroic and he admires their courage because the soldiers did not question their orders even though they were likely to be killed. To emphasise this point Tennyson wrote ‘Into the jaws of Death’. This tells us that if the soldiers do die, their death would not be pleasant. Only once in the poem does Tennyson mention that a mistake has been made by saying ‘not though the soldier knew. Someone had blundered’. As the soldiers rode through the ‘valley of death’ they were surrounded by the Russian cannons as the poem says ‘Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them. This tells us that the Russians had the British cavalry surrounded with cannons and were going to fire them as quickly as they could so they could kill as many soldiers as they could before they got to the Russian front line. At the end of the poem, in the last verse Tennyson wrote ‘Honour the charge they made, Honour the light brigade, Noble six hundred’. This tells us that in some way Tennyson wanted people to look at the Light Brigade as heroes.
