In the Library
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1854
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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Their's not to reason why, / Their's but to do and die, / Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane
Crane does the same thing, but from inside one frightened private's head, where the glory of a charge dissolves into noise and the wish to run.
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War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy does the same thing, but at the scale of a whole army, and shows the generals' orders arriving as garbled at Borodino as they did at Balaclava.
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The Iliad
Homer
Homer does the same thing, but three thousand years earlier, and the men who ride at each other under the walls of Troy each have a name, a father and a poet counting them.
£1.99
About the book
Say it aloud and your mouth does the galloping: half a league, half a league, a dactylic beat in three-time that will not slow and will not let you look away. Six hundred riders went down a valley of Russian guns at Balaclava because an order reached them garbled, and the astonishing thing is that Tennyson, Poet Laureate, admits it in the second stanza: some one had blunder'd. Then he honours them anyway. Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them; the repetition stacks the artillery into walls until you are inside the trap with the horses. Theirs not to reason why: the line is not a slogan for obedience so much as a measure of what obedience costs, and the poem carries both, the folly and the men who rode into it knowing. Late in life Tennyson recorded the poem onto a wax cylinder, and under the crackle the old voice is still counting them out.