If there were ever a shufti for verses that could inveigh conflictive colonial fracas like fulminate from fired fusillade and words that could bespeak the horror of a mutiny, like what ensued in the India of 1857, one need not venture beyond Tennyson’s ‘the Defence of Lucknow’.

Although arguments centred around its skeletal portrayal being reflective of colonialist alibi do hold true to a very great extent, had literary imagery and visual exposition been the sole parameters in a rarefied  review of a text of its like, ‘the Defence of Lucknow’ would’ve proved itself a nonpareil.

Never in the history of poetry has an insurrection in the Orient gained the like attention from a poet-laureate writing in the Occident. Handling, and successfully so, both the richness of imagery you would expect to come across in Spenser’s works, and the tactful and experimental densely-packed hexameter style (as Sherwood argues, perhaps “to re-echo the pandemonium of revolt and suggest the rapid heartbeat and staccato questions and answers produced by intense fear”) distinctive of his own self, the Victorian poet crafts nothing less of a visualised aura of the time he writes about, in which you could, in truth, expect some enchantment.

Patriotic in taste and unassailable in spirit, the poem brings to a reader descriptive developments through the 87-day strife the Company Residency at Lucknow was involved in, with the jingoistic band of mutineers. Where ‘death’ was the thought that clutched onto the minds of those that defended the fortifications, where numbers fell every new morning, where women and children wailed on coffin-less corpses, and where hope was almost lost, sound of the European ‘pibroch’ from relief contingents that fight their way through, ushers in light at the end of the long tunnel!

Besides, Tennyson does an unexampled job in also bringing forth words of remembrance for deeds done by the “kindly dark faces” who fought alongside - “faithful and few”. The characterisation differs, however - within, the dark skinned are faithful men of honour; without, they’re portrayed as ‘traitors’.

Given that the narrative the poet builds, and the perspective he writes from are not taken into consideration in the process of a review, the then pro-imperialistic minded Cantabrigian does deserve to be lauded for the manner in which he’s successfully constructed a complex and chaotic portrayal of a conflictive set focussed on its inhabitants - the helpless and the brave, the defenders - sworn to fall, the mutineers who flock in thousands, and the banner of England, that ever “upon the topmost roof”, in India, blew.

For a more detailed and politico-historical analysis, please access ‘Tennyson and the Fabrication of Englishness’ by Marion Frances Sherwood, Open University, at https://oro.open.ac.uk/61921/1/13837621.pdf