Poetry, Year 11: My Last Duchess, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Exposure (Power and Conflict option)

A dramatic monologue

提示A two-word term: the second word means a long speech by one person.

为什么We hear only the Duke, so we have to judge him from what he lets slip. He means to show off a painting and ends by revealing himself.

smiles

提示What she gave too freely, in his opinion.

为什么He never says what the commands were. Most readers take it that he had her killed. The calm, short clauses are what make it chilling.

A servant of a Count, sent to arrange the Duke's next marriage

提示The visitor's master has a daughter.

为什么He speaks of “The Count your master's known munificence”, meaning generosity: he is negotiating a dowry for a new wife while describing what he did to the last one.

nine-hundred-years-old

提示The age of his family title.

为什么He is angry that she thanked everyone alike, as if his ancient name were worth no more than a bough of cherries. His complaint shows pride, not any fault of hers.

He now controls completely who may look at her

提示In life he could not decide whom she smiled at.

为什么“(since none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)”. As a painting she is a possession he can cover and uncover.

The Duke's own wish to tame and control his wife

提示A powerful figure mastering a weaker creature.

为什么He moves from one art object to the next as if both were the same kind of thing. The poem is in rhyming couplets, though the sentences run over the line ends so the rhyme is easy to miss.

Death

提示Where the valley leads.

为什么The phrase echoes Psalm 23 in the Bible. Each stanza ends on the six hundred, until the last lines of the poem turn them into something to honour.

“Some one had blunder'd”

提示It does not say who.

为什么Tennyson does not name the officer at fault. The line is brief, blames nobody by name, and the poem moves straight on to the soldiers' obedience.

reason; die

提示They may not question, only act and fall.

为什么Three lines of the same shape and rhyme sound like a drill. Whether the poem admires this obedience without reserve, or lets its cost be seen, is a question to argue.

Crimean War

提示Fought in the 1850s on a peninsula in the Black Sea, against Russia.

为什么It happened at the Battle of Balaclava in October 1854. Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, wrote the poem within weeks, after reading a newspaper report.

The galloping of the horses

提示Say the line aloud and listen for hooves.

为什么A foot of one stressed and two unstressed syllables is called a dactyl. The falling, driving beat carries the reader forward with the charge.

Noble

提示An adjective for people of high character.

为什么The poem ends on praise of the men, not on the blunder. Tennyson is making sure they are remembered.

nothing

提示The opposite of what you expect in a war poem.

为什么The men wait for an attack that does not come. The repeated line makes the reader feel the waiting, and the pointlessness of it.

The weather: the cold, wind and snow

提示Look at the poem's title.

为什么Bullets are called “Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow”. The wind is described as “merciless iced east winds”.

An attacking army

提示Dawn usually brings hope; here it brings another assault.

为什么The daylight they should welcome is described in the language of the war. Nature has become the enemy.

Half-rhyme (also called pararhyme)

提示It is not a full match of sounds.

为什么The rhymes never quite click shut, which leaves the reader as unsettled and unsatisfied as the men.

dying

提示The same thing that is happening to the men.

为什么The soldiers' faith is failing with their bodies. The fifth line of each stanza is short, and several of them are questions or bleak statements like this one.

He was killed in action, one week before the war ended

提示The Armistice came on 11 November.

为什么Almost all his poems were published after his death. He wrote that his subject was war, and the pity of war.