The soldiers are surrounded by enemy cannon, left, right, and front.

It makes the feeling of being surrounded much more intense. It’s almost as if the reader is right there, turning your head right, left, and forward, and seeing cannons everywhere.

These lines sum up all of the honest, humble heroism of the soldiers.

They’re just doing their job. That job doesn’t let permit them to talk back to their commanders (make reply) or to figure out the point of the attack (reason why). All they can do is to ride and fight and possibly die (do and die).

The soldiers aren’t dumb. They know this charge isn’t a good idea, that someone has made a mistake, has blundered.

This is as close as the poem gets to criticizing the men who ordered this attack. The narrator is not a revolutionary, but you can feel some anger at the commanders in this poem, especially at this moment.

The Brigade is far too tough and loyal to feel dismayed. The use of the word not, implies that these men don’t feel discouraged at all. They’re ready to do their job, even though the order might be crazy.

Now we’re trying to get a peek into the heads of these soldiers, trying to imagine how it must feel to charge toward death.

The narrator asks if any of the soldiers were dismayed. In this case, to be dismayed means to lose your confidence, to be overcome by fear or depression. That would be a pretty normal reaction to a situation like this.

The order is repeated. The speaker really wants us to focus on those words, on the command to move forward. The men are being sent to their doom.

The speaker ends the first section of the poem with a little refrain, a kind of recap of what we’ve learned so far (in lines 3–4).

The brigade has been commanded to charge into the valley, and they’re riding in, even though they know that guns and Death await them.

Tennyson possibly left the man shouting the orders un-identified to keep us focused on the incredible, tough guys in the Light Brigade.

A brigade is a way of dividing up an army. They are cavalry soldiers, meaning they are riding on horseback.

They are named Light to separate them from the Heavy Brigade, another kind of cavalry unit at the time.

Tennyson isn’t being too specific. The reader already knows that someone is covering a certain distance in a haunting place.

Now we learn that there are six hundred people, and that they are riding, probably on horseback.