'Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front
of them'
The soldiers are going into battle
'Cannon to right of them, Cannon
to left of them, Cannon behind
them'
The soldiers are retreating
Positive verbs going into battle
& negative when retreating
Represents the mood of
the soldiers throughout
The men are always referred to collectively & it is
perhaps that this is why this poem is so different to
the others
Tennyson sees a glory within war, and he shows this through the
poem in noble aspirations and collective action. He doesn't show the
individual fear and corpses
The Brigade comes under fire in the third stanzas,
engage the enemy in the fourth & those who survive
retreat in the fifth, no longer soldiers but heroes
The final stanza is read as an epitaph for the Light Brigade
giving them a lot of praise. Even the punctuation, specifically
the exclamation marks, suggests glory rather than disaster