How would you begin to answer the question "Compare the ways poets present ideas about death in ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and in one other poem from ‘Power and Conflict’."

Both ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘Bayonet Charge’ deal with the topic of death during the first world war, but they present death differently. In ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ death is presented as quick and certain, as the “Light Brigade” travel rhythmically toward enemy canons and the associated “jaws of death”, in the final stanza of the poem, the poet demands that the fallen soldiers be honoured. However, in ‘Bayonet Charge’ the threat of death comes suddenly and unexpectedly to a sleeping soldier, and whilst in ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ the soldiers are charging towards death, the lone solider in ‘Bayonet Charge’ spends the poem desperately trying to run away from death. In ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ death is presented as a certainty rather than a possibility through repetition and a strong rhythm. The repeated metaphor of “the valley of Death” is used to emphasise that the soldiers are travelling towards certain death. The biblical phrase presents death as a symbolic valley that everyone must travel through as part of the human experience. In this manner, the phrase indicates that the soldiers are travelling towards death in the same way that everyone is travelling towards death. Likewise, the regular rhythm of the poem, in part created by the repetition of phrases such as “rode the six hundred”, conjures up the sense of galloping horses as the cavalry charge toward the enemy and help the poem feel like it is moving towards an inevitable conclusion. Some of this inevitability may stem from the fact that the poem is based on a historical event and so the fates of the soldiers have already been decided by history.