We no longer think that it is an honour to DIE for your country (to serve it, maybe) and that is perhaps one reason why we don’t feel comfortable with huge battles like those of World War One and Two, which had more in common with massacre than with honour. But our perspective on heroism has changed. Fighting wrong in other countries to help protect people who you’ve never met… that’s something truly indescribable. Soldiers who die in the line of fire are brave beyond brave. I mean, I get the feeling that we don’t generally consider it to be a brave and noble thing to die for your country. We need to understand what the poem says about how Victorians viewed heroes, and to know how we view heroes too. They’re often about heroic values too – what makes a hero, what does heroism look like to different cultures? Epics feature heroes that embody the qualities of a hero at that time in that country – they very much reflect the ideals and values of the time, how that culture viewed a hero. What do epics have in common? They are long, lengthy poems about heroic deeds. He wrote poems about mythology, about England, about King Arthur… all fantastically epic stuff. It also gave us Tennyson, who liked a bit of epic himself. The Victorian time gave us epics, and it gave us Dickens. That early start gave him all the practice he needed to become a poetry giant, if not THE poetry giant of all. Certainly beats obsessing over boy bands and reading Judy Blume like I was doing aged twelve, anyway. Tennyson was a fan of epics and at the age of twelve, he’d already written an epic 6000-line poem. He was born in 1809 in the Lincolnshire Wolds to a father who was the rector in a church. Then it’s up to you to think about how much of that is important for how it relates to the poem, just as you will do with Ozymandias and with My Last Duchess. That said, now I am going to tell you the context, and I am going to harp on about it. Don’t harp on about it because writing too much about it is as effective as drawing a triangle and working out the hypoteneuse. So when it comes to context, know it but don’t harp on about it. Your ability to write a page about the causes of the conflict in the Crimea in the 1850s is wonderful. Context and/or perspectives and/or ideas. Remember too that the mark for context also covers a mark for perspectives and/or ideas. In other words, what do you need to know to make sense of the poem? What I want to know is how the context of the poem was important for the content of the poem. If you’re reaching your third sentence on context, you have gone too far! If you are telling your examiner what happened in the Charge of the Light Brigade, you’re also going into an essay dead end. Full paragraphs about Tennyson or about the Battle of Balaclava will be treated as if they are an incongruous little physics equation or chemical calculation or artwork in the middle of your essay… nice, but not the domain of English Literature, and fairly unmarkable for the average GCSE English Literature student. Don’t forget that you are not writing a GCSE History essay and you are not expected to write more than a couple of sentences here and there where it is relevant. In terms of context, what you may want to know is a little about Tennyson and a little about the battle itself. It recounts a battle between the British and the Russian forces in the Battle of Balaclava in 1854 and it precedes later poems in the Power and Conflict section of the AQA GCSE English Literature poetry anthology such as Bayonet Charge and Exposure where conflict is explored in a critical way. The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson is a poem that recounts extreme acts of valour and patriotism.
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