Giving Voice to the Crimean War: Tennyson's "Charge" and Maud's Battle-song

Abstract

War poetry--whether epic narrative or lyric song--traditionally works to bring voices into unison. This is one its primary objectives: to ensure that a nation under threat marches syncopated lock-step. But happens when the war question is an unpopular one? During the Crimean War (1854-56), which Britain and France took up arms together to defend Turkey against an encroaching Russian empire, the public awareness bureaucratic bungling and general blunder (in the Light Brigade [1854], Tennyson picks up this word from a Times account) was so great as to result the toppling the Aberdeen Ministry. The war that was to have revitalized a threateningly mercantilized British manhood after a peace forty years devolved into was perceived by many to be farce. In this essay, I will look at Tennyson's two most famous Crimean War poems--The and Maud (1855)--in order to ask how the Victorians translated their response to such a conflict into verse. (1) In the work the Poet Laureate, we can see a complex negotiation the terrain patriotic martial poetry from the midst a war that was notoriously marked more by dissonance than by harmony. Curiously, Tennyson appears to have felt the need to do this war in different voices: while the Light Brigade deals impersonally but respectfully with a collective action, an epic deed, six rapid stanzas, Maud wallows spasmodically an individual's suffering. (2) Perhaps these formal distinctions explain why the poems are so rarely discussed together (as opposed to individually or serially), spite the fact that was written even as Tennyson was working on Maud. (3) An intimate link between them does appear, though, the crucial place a martial the narrative Maud. When the speaker first encounters Maud, she is Death, and that cannot die (4): She is singing an air that is known to me, A passionate gallant and gay, A martial song like a trumpet's call! Singing alone the morning life, In the happy morning life and May, Singing men that battle array, Ready heart and ready hand, March with banner and bugle and fife To the death, for their native land. (I.164-172) Although this chivalrous (I.383) remains unrecorded, it manages to reverberate throughout the pages the poem that bears its singer's name. Many critics have been tempted to read Maud's contrast with the larger work into which it is (albeit silently) embedded. Thus Herbert Tucker has argued that it is traditional, belonging to an at odds with the dismal present Maud. (5) Similarly, Tricia Lootens claims that what sings itself, through [Maud], is the combined folk and chivalric tradition from which the future author the Idylls the King (1859-85) was to draw his most ambitious attempts to link England's idealized past to its future. (6) Yet the aristocratic nostalgia invoked might belong as much to the poet's current works as to his future ones: it may be that nostalgia commonly attributed to Tennyson's Charge, a poem to which he himself referred repeatedly as a ballad (7) and which, according to Jerome McGann, also represents an attempt to reinstate the historically threatened aristocracy. (8) After all, both honour and death figure prominently there, too. Honour takes over the imperative form the final stanza the poem from the otherwise controlling Charge the title, seeming almost to be similarly reified--converted from verb into noun--in the process being written into the meter (ll. 53, 54). And the other end towards which the charges irrevocably is death--as both valley of (ll. 3, 16) and jaws of (ll. 24, 46). In follows, I shall consider it means to imagine Maud's battle-song as an air known to the poet as well as to his speaker: as Tennyson's own Charge. …