Summary

The poem tells the story of a brigade consisting of 600 soldiers who rode on horseback into the valley of
death for half a league (about one and a half miles). They were obeying a command to charge the enemy
forces that had been seizing their guns.
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 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 soldiers struck the enemy gunners with their unsheathed swords (sabres bare) and charged at the enemy
army while the rest of the world looked on in wonder. They rode into the artillery smoke and broke through the
enemy line, destroying their Cossack and Russian opponents. Then they rode back from the offensive, but they
had lost many men so they were not the six hundred any more.
Canons behind and on both sides of the soldiers now assaulted them with shots and shells. As the brigade
rode back from the mouth of hell, soldiers and horses collapsed; few remained to make the journey back.
The world marvelled at the courage of the soldiers; indeed, their glory is undying: the poem states these noble
600 men remain worthy of honor and tribute today.

Form
This poem is comprised of six numbered stanzas varying in length from six to twelve lines. Each line is in
dimeter, which means it has two stressed syllables; moreover, each stressed syllable is followed by two
unstressed syllables, making the rhythm dactylic. The use of falling rhythm, in which the stress is on the first
beat of each metrical unit, and then falls off for the rest of the length of the meter, is appropriate in a poem
about the devastating fall of the British brigade.
The rhyme scheme varies with each stanza. Often, Tennyson uses the same rhyme (and occasionally even the
same final word) for several consecutive lines: Flashed all their sabres bare / Flashed as they turned in air /
Sabring the gunners there. The poem also 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.

Commentary
The Charge of the Light Brigade recalls a disastrous historical military engagement that took place during the
initial phase of the Crimean War fought between Turkey and Russia (1854-56). Under the command of Lord
Raglan, British forces entered the war in September 1854 to prevent the Russians from obtaining control of the
important sea routes through the Dardanelles. From the beginning, the war was plagued by a series of
misunderstandings and tactical blunders, one of which serves as the subject of this poem: on October 25,
1854, as the Russians were seizing guns from British soldiers, Lord Raglan sent desperate orders to his Light
Cavalry Brigade to fend off the Russians. Finally, one of his orders was acted upon, and the brigade began
chargingbut in the wrong direction! Over 650 men rushed forward, and well over 100 died within the next few
minutes. As a result of the battle, Britain lost possession of the majority of its forward defenses and the only
metaled road in the area.
In the 21st century, the British involvement in the Crimean War is dismissed as an instance of military
incompetence; we remember it only for the heroism displayed in it by Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse.
However, for Tennyson and most of his contemporaries, the war seemed necessary and just. He wrote this
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.
Unlike the medieval and mythical subject of The Lady of Shalott or the deeply personal grief of Tears, Idle
Tears, this poem instead deals with an important political development in Tennysons day. As such, it is part of
a sequence of political and military poems that Tennyson wrote after he became Poet Laureate of England in
1850, including Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852) and Riflemen, Form (1859). These
poems reflect Tennysons emerging national consciousness and his sense of compulsion to express his
political views.
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 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. Even Lord Raglan,
who played such an important role in the battle, is only vaguely referred to in the line someone had blundered.
Interestingly, Tennyson omitted this critical and somewhat subversive line in the 1855 version of this poem, but
the writer John Ruskin later convinced him to restore it for the sake of the poems artistry. Although it underwent
several revisions following its initial publication in 1854, the poem as it stands today is a moving tribute to
courage and heroism in the face of devastating defeat.