These are probably random and pointless words to you. Dactyl (STRESS-unstressed-unstressed) and then a trochee (STRESS-unstressed) You start off with a really strong beat and kind of get carried along with it. These lines have a really driving rhythm. That’s three reasons that these lines form neat pairs. In my copy, the lines are also indented on the page. It’s like the mid-point of each stanza (or just before). If the stanza has eight lines, the fourth and eighth are these ones. I’m pretty sure with the rhyme of these two pairs of lines that Tennyson is using them to not only weave the poem together but also to form these pairs of lines, which are a bit like stopping points holding the poem together. So for that reason, I like it as a five. I’m pretty sure, whilst I can accept hun-der-ed as a pronunciation, nobody would say thun-der-ed or won-der-ed. Now apart from the fact that these lines rhyme with the end line of each stanza, they’re also five syllables. The first is that we’ve got another line in each stanza that is most definitely five syllables: Still, there are reasons I like it to be five syllables and not six. That gives you something else to think about. Rawnsley, in Lincolnshire, Tennyson’s home county, the pronunciation would have been hun-der-ed. According to one of Tennyson’s friends, W. The five-syllable final line might not be all that it looks, so we’ll look at that a little more.Īll six stanzas finish with what appears to be a five-syllable line:īut you could actually say “hundred” (normally two syllables, hun-dred) as three syllables: hun-der-ed. Lots of six-syllable lines in there, and some sevens. I don’t think you notice the lack of neatness when you are reading it, but it’s not quite so neat as you’d expect.įirst the syllables. You’ll not notice yourself tripping over words.īut when you get down into the mechanics of those techniques, it’s not always so neat. The line breaks, the rhythm, the rhyme and the metre all make the poem very easy to read aloud. It reads like a poem designed for performance, not a poem designed to be constrained by the page. We’ll explore more about that later, but it’s a poem that’s very easy to read aloud. Then there’s also the way it reads, the way Tennyson has used rhythm. So I can wonder to myself if he’s just used the number of lines that felt natural to use, or whether there’s a kind of sense of build up to something in the fourth and fifth stanzas. There’s no real regularity, is there? 8 lines, 9 lines… then 9, 12, 11 and 6. I’ll do my usual as well: bit of feature spotting, which is all very well, but not worth very much, and a bit of commentary on the writer’s purpose as well as the effect on the reader.įirstly, the stanzas. I’ll be looking at how he uses these three techniques to give a really rollicking rhythm to the poem, and why he does that. One thing I know about Tennyson is that he loves rhyme, rhythm and metre. So how do I apply this to “The Charge of the Light Brigade”? Structure is the arrangement and sequence of the ideas, as well as some other aspects. This explores how the ideas are organised and sequenced, viewpoint/perspective (third person? First person?) TiP ToP – Time Place Topic Person – shifts? Shift in time? Place? Why are the ideas in this order? External actions (happenings) vs internal thoughts? Circular structure? Beginning, middle, end? How does the title weave through the poem? Does the ending link back or develop from the opening? Why does it look the way it does? What decisions has the poet made about what he has put on one line and what on another? Why this form? Structure ) phrase splits and the way the words fall on each line, which ideas are linked within the line or stanza and which are separate, caesura, enjambment.įorm is what makes it a poem and not prose. How it’s set out on the page line length, syllables, rhythm (metre) rhyme, what words are on what line, number of lines, sonnet, couplets, three lines, quatrains, regularity of the number of lines in a verse/stanza, capitals (or lack of) main punctuation at the end of lines or stanzas (. I have a kind of loose framework of things I might want to think about: Form Some of you may be wondering what I have in my head when I come to a poem to think about the form and structure. This post will look in more detail at the form and structure of the poem to help you write about it in any exam. The poem was one of the first real-time responses to war reportage in the newspapers, written in Tennyson’s role as Poet Laureate. In last week’s post, I looked at the context behind Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in AQA’s GCSE English Literature poetry anthology, “Power and Conflict”.
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