Like a ghost from the past, Tennyson reads his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Like the Whitman recording, it too was taken from a wax cylinder Thomas Edison made in 1890. Tennyson can be hard to understand at times, especially at the poem’s most famous lines: “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.” Odd, too, is the mysterious knocking at the end.
