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For this activity, you will need to turn to the poem 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which can be found in the Power and Conflict section of your Anthology.

 

battle

 

Tennyson wrote 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' after reading a newspaper report about the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.  

 

On the 25th October 1854, 670 cavalrymen and officers were given a badly judged order to attack Russian troops who were armed with cannons. Tennyson relates how the cavalry (the ‘Light Brigade’) attacked, showing heroic bravery and discipline, despite the other side surrounding them with cannons.  They failed to defeat the gunners and were forced to retreat, losing more than two hundred men killed outright, wounded or captured

 

In the following questions, you will be asked to analyse the language devices used in the poem.

 

You should always refer to your own text when working through these examples. These quotations are for reference only.

10 questions
The quotations/text used in this exercise are from the copyrighted works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ā€˜The Charge of the Light Brigadeā€™