War Poetry :: English Literature

War Poetry Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen present different ideas about war in their poems, â€Å"The Charge of the Light Brigade† and â€Å"Dulce et Decorum est†. Write about these poems and their effect on you. â€Å"The Charge of the Light Brigade† was written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about The Battle of Balaclava which took place in 1854. Tennyson wrote the poem using information from an article in The Times and it remembers the bravery of the outnumbered cavalry men who were wrongly sent into battle. â€Å"Dulce et Decorum est† was written by Wilfred Owen during the First World War. It was written to show the truth about war and to illustrate that it is not a good thing to die for your country. â€Å"The Charge of the Light Brigade† has six verses. The third, fourth and fifth stanzas concentrate on the battle itself. The main part of the battle is depicted in verse four and tells how the soldiers were â€Å"sabring the gunners† and how â€Å"Cossack and Russian reeled† portraying the victory of the Light Brigade. The final stanza is a message from the poet to â€Å"honour the Light Brigade† and not to forget what the six hundred men did. The poem has a constant rhyming pattern all the way through with words like â€Å"blundered†, â€Å"hundred†, â€Å"thundered† and â€Å"wondered† or â€Å"shell†, â€Å"fell† and â€Å"well†. Having this rhyming pattern throughout makes the poem seem to flow more easily and gives it a more prominent structure. It emulates the pace of the battle which was over in twenty minutes. The rhythm of â€Å"The Charge of the Light Brigade† mimics the sound of horses’ hooves by using tripling such as â€Å"half a league, half a league, half a league onward† the sound of galloping horses is continued when the poet uses words like â€Å"volleyed and thundered†. Tennyson draws attention to the fact that The Battle of Balaclava was one of the biggest military blunders ever made in his poem by writing â€Å"Into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell† showing that to send the Light Brigade into battle was wrong and that hardly any of them would return. In verse two the poet informs the reader that the soldiers knew that a mistake had been made but followed the orders anyway. The lines â€Å"Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die† show that the soldiers could not refuse to go into battle, even if they knew â€Å"someone had blundered†, all they had to do was go into battle and die. Tennyson shows admiration for the Light Brigade in his poem.