Tumultuous hoof-beats sound in these repetitions. "Blunder'd," though used only once, begets the rhyme with "the six hundred", main component of the poem's trenchant refrain. The Times article seems to have led Tennyson to the phrase, "Someone had blunder'd", and so to his perfectly-chosen metrical scheme – dactylic dimeter. Back in his study he swiftly transcribed it, then sent it to the London Examiner, where it was published a week later, on 9 December 1854.
The genre is an oral one, and it's significant that, before he wrote anything down, Tennyson sang the poem aloud as he walked over the chalk ridge near his home on the Isle of Wight.
But this is also poetry in the ancient costume of the ballad, re-tailored for new times by the Romantic poets a little earlier. Written in response to a Times editorial, in which the author referred to "a hideous blunder" in the conduct of the battle, The Charge of the Light Brigade may signal a new journalistic genre of poetry, where, if the news can't be got from poems, poets can certainly get their poems from the news. To its admirers, the poem's a tribute to the Light Brigade's selfless courage: to its attackers, it's the sentimental glorification of war and empire. Tennyson's poem is not, of course, a fantasy: it's a largely accurate account of an actual, and very dreadful, historical event which took place during the Battle of Balaclava. The subject is an emotive one, centred on the timelessly appealing stereotype of heroic ordinary soldier versus incompetent high command (a theme which continued to grip the imagination of the poets of the first world war). It's certainly the kind of poem people love or hate for anything-but-literary reasons. So how does it look from 2014? Great poem, good poem, bad poem, good bad poem? It's a verdict Steane himself tentatively commends ("I think there might be something in it.") Even the poet seems to have found its popularity irritating. Once enormously popular and much-memorised, this week's poem, Alfred Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, was also vilified, according to JB Steane, as "horrid rubbish".
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