"The Last of the Light Brigade" is a poem written in 1890 by

Rudyard Kipling Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work. ...

echoing – thirty-six years after the event –

Alfred Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his ...

's famous poem '' The Charge of the Light Brigade''. Employing synecdoche, Kipling uses his poem to expose the terrible hardship faced in old age by veterans of the

Crimean War The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. Geopolitical causes of the war included the ...

, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the light brigade who charged at the Battle of Balaclava. It describes a visit by the last twenty survivors of the charge to Tennyson (then in his eightieth year) to reproach him gently for not writing a sequel about the way in which England was treating its old soldiers. Some sources treat the poem as an account of a real event, but other commentators class the destitute old soldiers as allegorical, with the visit invented by Kipling to draw attention to the poverty in which the real survivors were living, in the same way that he evoked

Tommy Atkins Tommy Atkins (often just Tommy) is slang for a common soldier in the British Army. It was certainly well established during the nineteenth century, but is particularly associated with the First World War. It can be used as a term of reference ...

in " The Absent Minded Beggar".

Reception

Unlike Tennyson's poem, and like first-person accounts of the Light Brigade, Kipling's poem was largely ignored.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Last Of The Light Brigade, The Poetry by Rudyard Kipling Victorian poetry Crimean War fiction