Parodies on Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade

Walter Hamilton takes one of the most solemnly absurd poems in the English language , Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" with its six hundred horses galloping into the "valley of death" , and turns it into something far more hilarious. Each parody keeps the original's thundering, slightlyridiculous rhythm while swapping cavalry charges for clergy scrambling toward a benefice, doctors hastening to a wealthy patient, or engineers surveying a railway to nowhere. The humor lies in the collision: heroic language applied to mundane professional scrambles, the pomposity of Victorian occupational anxiety rendered in the grandest possible terms. Hamilton skewers the clergy's benefice-hunting, the fairer sex's fashion follies, and theEngineers' grandiose schemes with sharp observational wit. It's literary parody at its most satisfying , you need to know the original to fully appreciate the joke, and once you do, every "half a league onward" becomes an invitation to laugh at whoever's being send-up next.