Comparison of the Charge of the Light Brigade and Vitae Lampada Essay Example

this by using a cricket game to put an idea expressed in phrase in the mind of the reader the phrase being ‘’Play up! Play up! And play the game! ’’. He uses the cricket scene because of how the words of encouragement used in the game, can be used in a much more serious situation later on in life and in his poem that serious situation happens to be war. The same spirit of fair play and individual effort that is used in the game is recalled in a situation of military defeat.

In “The Charge of the Light Brigade” Lord Tennyson makes it fairly obvious what the situation was, due to the name of the poem and repetition of the phrase ‘Rode the six hundred’ at the end of every verse. This is similar to what Newbolt does with ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game! ’. Tennyson’s poem was written only weeks after the disastrous charge at the Battle of Balaclava 25/10/1854 when, due to a misunderstood order, the Calvary rode directly into the fire of the Russian guns and were decimated. Only 195 of the cavalry returned from the charge, many of them severely wounded.

The situation is non-specific in Newbolt’s poem, it could be anywhere in the British Empire where desert conditions exist-‘The sand of the desert is sudden red’. Comparably, though, the situation is disastrous: The ‘square’ (military formation) is broken, the colonel is dead, the Gatling is jammed but still the men must fight on, or ‘Play the game’. Tennyson had to do was “white-wash” the disaster to make the public look up to the soldiers and forget all

about the absolute stupidity of it all ‘Someone had blundered’.

But Newbolt barely says anything about the reasons for the disaster. The reader knows only that because he mentioned ‘And England’s far’ and that ‘the river of death has grimed his banks’- a classical reference to the river Stynx in Greek mythology which the soul has to pass over in order to reach ‘the land of the shades’. Both poems use the same powerful repetition for every verse ‘rode the six hundred’ for Lord Tennyson and ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game! ’ for Newbolt.

Although both poems use this same device they both have different reasons. Looking at “The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Lord Tennyson uses it in the 1st three verses to build up tension, to keep the idea of the soldiers (the 600) riding into the valley their death, in the mind of the reader, it makes it seem as if the soldiers had no idea what they were going in to until it was too late. Henry Newbolt’s reason for using the same device of repetition, at the end of every verse ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game! ; is used to make the reader keep retracing the first time it was used in the poem in the cricket match and later in war.

He does this to imply that the things we learn as a child will stay with us (things like cheers, comments and patriotic phrases) and may be used to cheer and encourage us through difficult times in life. Both poets seem entirely to agree with the patriotic sentiments in the poems, although 21st century readers

may very strangely agree from the perspective of two world wars, The “Cold War” and the disastrous on-going wars of this century.