The tone of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ is similar in some respects because they both introduce irony into their poems. Robert Southey uses repetition to emphasise the irony in his poem. He does this by ending most of the verses with Old Kaspar saying ‘Twas a famous victory’; the opposite of what he really means. Tennyson introduces irony by using the one word ‘blundered’. The soldiers’ loyalty and courage was charging them to death and not victory.
Robert Southey uses lots of alliteration in his poem, one example of this is in verse five when ‘little Wilhelmine looks up with wonder waiting eyes’. Southey uses this alliteration to make ‘little Wilhelmine’ sound curious, as if she wants to know what happened. Alfred Tennyson also uses alliteration in his poem but not quite so much. In verse five he says ‘while the world wondered’ as if he was trying to make it sound like an audience was watching.
There are no similes in either of the two poems but there are metaphors and I think this is because a metaphor makes a sentence sound more powerful and dramatic, it also evokes the terror. There are many examples of this in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’; ‘into the valley of death’, ‘into the jaws of death’, ‘into the mouth of hell’. Alfred Tennyson also uses imagery to help set the scene on your mind. ‘All in the valley of death’ helps to create a picture of what it was like by using metaphors. Robert Southey does not use any metaphors but there is still imagery contained in the narrative of the poem.
There is lots of repetition used in the ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ which helps to create the ironic effect of the poem. At the ends of verses 3, 4, 6, 8, 9 ,10 and 11 he repeats the phrases ‘great victory’ and ‘famous victory’. By the end of this poem he makes it sound as if this is what he was told the war was like by his parents and that is how he wants it to stay so at very end he quickly says ‘twas a famous victory’. Alfred Tennyson uses repetition to make the poem have a dramatic effect but also because it fits into the rhythm of the poem.
‘The Battle of Blenheim’ is set out in eleven verses with four lines in each verse, this is a typical structure for a ballad with stanzas arranged in it. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ has six verses with different amounts of lines in nearly every one.
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ had a dactylic rhythm which helps to create the effect of galloping horses. Alfred Tennyson has done this by stressing some of the syllables in his arrangements of words to form a pattern; e.g. / x x / x x / x x / x
‘Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward.’
Robert Southey has arranged his poem so that each unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable e.g.
x / x / x / x / x / x / x /
‘And he before his cottage door was sitting in the sun’
The rhythmical pattern that Robert Southey uses is called iambic. This helps to keep the poem flowing with four stresses followed by 3 stresses in the following line, however, there is an exception to this on the last two lines of each stanza which have four stresses which rhyme together, this is called a rhyming couplet.
‘And by him sported on the green
His little grandchild Wilhelmine.’
The effect of this is to bring the end of each stanza to a conclusion, however, Tennyson’s pattern gives the effect of galloping horses which makes each stanza itself more interesting to the reader.
At first it is hard to find the rhyming pattern in ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ as in the first verse there is only onward/hundred’. In the rest of the stanzas the lines cluster such as in stanza two: ‘reply’, ‘why’ and ‘die’.
‘The Battle of Blenheim’ has an even more regular pattern with the use of rhyming couplets.
I believe that both poets set out to involve some kind of propaganda in their poems. Chambers Dictionary defines ‘propaganda’ as:
‘any association, activity, plan, etc. for the spread of opinions and principles, especially to effect change or reform.’
Robert Southey uses irony as a form of propaganda by trying to tell people that war is not such a great thing; ‘It was a famous victory’.
Although Alfred Tennyson also uses propaganda I believe he uses this in a different way. Tennyson is trying to prevent people from criticizing ordinary soldiers for the defeat when the blame should have been on the higher ranking commanders:
‘Not though the soldier knew,
Some one had blundered.’
I think both these types of propaganda are very successful though I think what Robert Southey was trying to convey was quite a bit clearer in his poem than in Tennyson’s. I believe this is because what he was trying to tell people is easier to understand and most people in the twenty first century know that was is not such a great thing. However, when Southey wrote this poem people might not have thought in this way and so this poem could have seemed quite radical at the time. Another reason why his message is clearer is because the structure of his poem is simpler making it accessible for ordinary people to understand.
Though both of these poems are about war and propaganda I still believe that they are very different because of the way they are written and their meanings. Personally I prefer ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ because of the language the poet uses for example:
‘Boldly they rode and well’ [which also shows his use of onomatopoeia]
and
‘Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die’
Also I like the way Tennyson uses the rhythm of the charging horses throughout the whole poem. Reading this makes me feel as if I could see the six hundred charging through the battlefield in my mind’s eye. This also makes me feel for the four hundred that never returned back from their pointless mission.
