The battlefield, of course, is where most of the action in Tennyson’s poem takes place. As mentioned in the Symbols section, the battlefield is described as and likened to “the valley of Death” (3). The repetition of the phrase numerous times across the course of the poem testifies to its importance. Besides the Biblical allusion, the image of the “valley” as something that the cavalry of soldiers must descend into also contains an air of foreboding and impending doom, as if they must physically reach a point of lower altitude before they can meet their deaths. The lowness of the valley sets the stage for the poem to later compare the battlefield to the “mouth of hell” (25). In the cultural imagination, hell is often pictured as a lower realm.