Analysing a poem: hear Tennyson's own 1890 reading of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'

Grade 7 (Year 8, age 12 to 13) · 50 min · Teacher device, projector and speakers

Year 8 have read 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', published in December 1854, about six weeks after the charge at Balaclava, and can say what happens in it. Today is about its rhythm. From YouTube, the teacher plays the wax-cylinder recording made in 1890 of Tennyson reading the poem himself. It is faint and crackly, so students have the text in front of them, and they listen to the opening once without writing. On the second playing they put a mark over each syllable the poet leans on, starting with 'Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward', where the weight falls on each 'Half' and two lighter syllables hurry after it. The teacher replays the opening lines several times at three-quarter speed, using YouTube's playback setting, so each stress can be picked out of the crackle, stopping after the first 'Rode the six hundred', until the class agrees where the beats fall.

Students then write in their books how a rhythm of one heavy beat and two light ones suits a cavalry charge, and why Tennyson might have ended each of the six stanzas on the words 'six hundred'.

Why this is Passive Amplify

Students listen and mark a printed copy while the teacher plays and replays the recording, so they receive the content and do not steer it. The task is the familiar one of marking the stresses in a poem heard aloud, and the lesson uses what the playback adds: the same line of the poet's own 1890 reading, slowed and repeated exactly, so the class checks and corrects its marks against how Tennyson himself spoke them until everyone agrees.

Compared with

The teacher reading the poem aloud from the class anthology while students mark the stresses they hear.

Watch out

If the recording were played once through at normal speed, the lesson would use nothing the technology adds and would be Passive Replace.

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Analysing a poem: hear Tennyson's own 1890 reading of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'.

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