Use Of Metaphors In 'All Quiet On The Western Front'

1.Tennyson uses repetiton and metaphorical language to show his admiration for the soldiers who died in the battle of balaclava.he repeats “rode the six hundred” and “into the jaws of death” to describe the bravery and boldness of the soldiers. The repetition emphasises that 600 hundred soldiers sacrificed their lives and that we should acknowledge their sacrifice and honour them. The metaphor/pesonification “into the jaws of death” implies that the soldiers knew that they were doomed but they still obeyed the orders; death is pesonified as a beastly monster whom the soldiers can’t escape from/are entraped by.Tennyson respects that the soldier’s obeyed the order of their commander.

2.The poet uses alliteration and onamatopoeia to convey how ferocious and violent the battle of balaclava was.The guns ‘stormed at’ the soldiers with ‘shot and shell’.This alliteration mimics the barrage of assault the soldiers faced and how the bullets pierced through their skin.The onamatopoeia ‘volley’d and thundered’ also imitates the deep resounding sound of cannons shooting at the soldiers.All this imagery makes us feel as if we are on the battle field with the soldiers this helps us emphatize with their situation and gives us the impression that the soldiers were courageous and they had the guts to fight such a dangerous war; the war they knew they were going to lose.

Tennyson doesn’t have any respect for the commander. this is evident in the poem as he says ‘someone had blundered’ this implies that the commander is a fool and because of his mistake 600 hundred lives were gone in vain.Alternately, you could also think that Tennyson doesn’t really blame anyone because the description of the ‘someone’ who ‘blundered’ is very vague.This shows that he didn’t want to write a poem to pass on the blame, he wrote the poem because he wanted to glorify the