The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Hussar is a bummer, only para-rhymes seem to fit: bizarre, beaux arts, faux pas, disbar, ajar, papa and hurrah might do at a pinch, but they hardly promise suitably solemn material; besides, the plural Hussars excludes at least half of them. Lancers is OK: dancers, prancers, answers–some suggestive possibilities there. Dragoons is if anything worse than Hussars: lagoons seems to be the only proper rhyme, the slant-rhyme racoon is unlikely to come in handy, nor are jejune, cartoon and baboon, one feels. Brigade is better, much better. Made, invade, fade, raid, dismayed, laid, all words that might offer some connection with the subject matter. Russian? There’s Prussian which is of no relevance, otherwise there are only bad para-rhymes available, hushin’, cushion, pushin’. Horses gives the rather obvious forces and courses, while steeds offers deeds…Off on their galloping steedsPraise for their marvellous deeds…

Hmmm…bit lame. Rhymes for guns might come in handy. Buns, runs, sons, Huns (shame the enemy are Ruskies), stuns, shuns? Hm, come back to that later. Six hundred and seventy three is simply too long: a whole three-beat line used up.Six hundred and seventy-threeCharging to victory!

Only it isn’t a victory–it is a terrible defeat.Six hundred and seventy-threeCharging for Queen and Country!Oh what a wonder to see,Marvellous gallantrySix hundred and seventy-three!

This is dreadful. Six hundred and seventy-three sounds too perky and too literal at the same time. Should we round it up or down? Six hundred or seven hundred? Hundred doesn’t rhyme with much though–oh, hang on, there are some good slant-rhymes here: thundered, sundered, blundered, wondered, onward.Onward, Light Brigade, OnwardOnward you splendid six-hundred.‘There are the guns to raid,Charge them,’ brave Nolan said.On rode the Light Brigade,Not knowing that Nolan had blundered!

It is getting there. The accidental consonance/assonance of knowing/Nolan is inelegant. But a bit of a polish and who knows?

Your turn now. See if you can come up with some phrases with that metre and those rhyme words, or ones close to them.

Well, as you probably know, Tennyson did not retire from his laureateship and this is what he came up with to mark the calamity.

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

‘Charge for the guns!’ he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blunder’d:

Their’s not to make reply,

Their’s not to reason why,

Their’s but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made,

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred.

Naturally, I cannot tell how Tennyson embarked upon the preparation and composition of his poem. Quite possibly he charged (as it were) straight in. Maybe the rhythm and some of the phrasing came to him in the bath or while walking. It is possible that he made notes not unlike those we’ve just made or that the work emerged whole in one immediate and perfect Mozartian stream. We shall never know. What we can agree upon I hope, is that the rhyming is perfect. Shell/hell, brigade/made/dismayed and the wondered/blundered, thundered/sundered, hundred/onward group work together superbly. A small nucleus of rhyming words like this throughout one poem can set up a pattern of expectation in the listener’s or reader’s ear. ‘Thundered’ is close to onomatopoeic, it seems somehow more than just descriptive of thunder, it actually seems to mimic it–and those thunderous qualities are in turn passed on to its rhyme-partners, lending a power and force to wondered and hundred that they would not otherwise possess. The rhyming, quite as much as the rhythm, helps generate all the pity, pride and excitement for which the poem is renowned.

We do know that in writing this Tennyson created a rod for the back of all subsequent British Poets Laureate who have struggled in vain to come up with anything that so perfectly captures an important moment in the nation’s history. It was perhaps the last great Public Poem written in England, the verse equivalent of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.