Many schools use the AQA English Literature specification for GCSE, and will be used to teaching Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ as part of the Conflict and Power cluster of poems. It seems to be one of the more popular poems, and this might relate to the poem’s memorable rhythm - this certainly seemed to be the case in a video I saw a few months ago of some school students vigorously reciting it in their playground in unison with their teacher.
English teachers love complicated terminology, and like me, you have probably taught your students that the energetic rhythm is achieved through Tennyson’s use of dactylic dimeter (BAH-ba-ba BAH-ba-ba). When I first started teaching this poem, I would tell students that this was to evoke the sound of the Light Brigade galloping towards the enemy on horseback.
This isn’t wrong, but I found that my students would tag this on to their answers - seemingly just so they could use the complicated terminology. Students were not linking their ideas to their own personal response to the text.
If students were to begin with something like ‘Tennyson heightens the drama of the charge, to emphasise the bravery of the Light Brigade’, I think the comment about the meter evoking galloping horses is now relevant - students have to consider what the technique is doing, in relation to the poet’s intent.
This can be demonstrated with the following line:
‘Charge for the guns!’ he said
Dactylic dimeter is used in this line to aurally highlight the words ‘charge’ and ‘guns’. These two words stick out, and arguably this achieves the same effect as the aforementioned galloping horses effect - these two words are exciting/dramatic elements of conflict (fighting and killing), that help to bring the battle to life.
But what about the words that aren’t stressed? In this line, we have ‘for the’ and ‘he said’. I can’t see any significance in the former unstressed phrase, but the latter seems really important to me when I consider what I know about this poem contextually. Tennyson arguably wishes to emphasise bravery, and minimise the mistake - the ‘blunder’ by the commanding officers is only mentioned once in the poem. As the speech tag ‘he said’ is unstressed due to the meter of the line, it helps to brush this embarrassing detail under the carpet. I would likely use this reference in a paragraph that began like this:
Tennyson minimises the mistakes that were made in the Battle of Balaclava, so that the audience are mainly focused on the bravery and glory of the Light Brigade.
A simple set of questions that you might ask your students to consider when studying a text that has a particular meter are:
• Why does the writer stress these words?
• Why does the writer make these words unstressed?
This could apply to poetry, or a Shakespeare text. For example, in Act I Scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo utters the following when seeing Juliet for the first time:
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss
The following words, that are stressed in iambic pentameter, interest me
• profane
• hand
• holy
• shrine
• sin
• lips
• smooth
• rough
• kiss
As a DO NOW task, before reading this scene, students could be asked to consider connections between these words. Later on in the lesson, you could provide students with the terminology (iambic pentameter), which would hopefully allow them to discuss the method from a position that is rooted more in authorial intent, rather than simply tagging on the terminology.
The views in this blog are not necessarily shared or endorsed by the centre that I currently work at.
Photo at the top of the page by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
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