'Capable of Giving True Pleasure'

The Crimean War (1854-56) is remembered in the West for being the first photographically documented major conflict and for Tennyson’s barnburner of a poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The blundering attack during Battle of Balaclava, on October 25, 1854, was a slaughter for British forces. The war pitted Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia against Russia, which threatened to take control of the Dardanelles. Apart from its rousing rhetoric-- 

“Half a league half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred”

 

--Tennyson’s poem is noteworthy for celebrating bravery (however misguided) rather than victory. Like generations of prior students I learned “The Charge of the Light Brigade” not from a book but from Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, who recited Tennyson’s poem, or at least the first two verses and a portion of the third, in the 1936 Our Gang comedy “Two Too Young.” Even in that form the poem was rousing and rhythmically memorable. I can’t remember not knowing the lines Alfalfa recites and a few others later in the poem, in particular “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die,” which I’ve always thought distilled a military and patriotic ideal.

 

Some fifty other poems were written by English poets to commemorate the charge but only Tennyson’s has survived in memory. Casualties included 118 dead, 127 wounded and 60 taken prisoner by the Russians. French Marshal Pierre Bosquet, who witnessed the charge, famously observed: “C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie.” Little more than a month later, on December 9, 1854, Tennyson published his poem in the Examiner. Slightly revised, it was collected the following year in Maud, and Other Poems, and published as a four-page quarto broadsheet for British troops in the Crimea.

 

In his essay on Kipling, George Orwell famously described Tennyson’s poem, among others, as a prime example of the “good bad poem.” He defines his terms: “All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet – not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.”