The Man He Killed

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1902

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Although Hardy experimented with complicated formal structures during his nearly two-decades-long work in poetry—typographical effects, irregular line lengths, variations in stanza lengths (reflecting his early passion for architecture), and the use of shifting point-of-view refrains—the formal structure of “The Man He Killed” reflects Hardy’s interest in capturing the psychology and personality of a common working-class infantry soldier.

Formal experiments typically call attention to the poet. Here, however, the form is direct and clear: five quatrains (four-line stanzas) with a regular rhyme scheme: ABAB. The form never calls attention to itself and thus creates the tone and feel of a foot soldier. Elaborate or subtle designs with intricate and subtle iterations would detract—it is as if the reader is sitting and listening to this soldier. The integrity of that simple form reflects Hardy’s desire to create sympathy with a common soldier struggling to understand exactly what combat has done to him.

“The Man He Killed” tells a story in that the poet stands apart like a dramatist and allows the character to create himself through an unfolding monologue that provides the reader with the typical narrative elements: exposition, rising action, conflict, resolution, and denouement. Here, Hardy uses the ballad meter, which calls back to sung epics and heroic ballads as the speaker shares his own harrowing tale on the battlefield. Within each quatrain, the meter alternates between two lines of iambic trimeter (that is, six syllable beats, three units of da-DUH) and then two lines of iambic tetrameter (that is, eight syllable beats, four units of da-DUH). This melodic meter gives the poem a feel of a song sung in a tavern. The meter is regular with little real variation, mimicking the feel of verses of a song. Indeed, British indie folk singer Billy Bragg recorded the poem acapella and set to the tune of an early-19th-century folk ballad called “The Snows They Melt the Soonest.” Bragg sang his rendition, rich and mournful, at the 2014 Glastonbury Music Festival in Somerset, England, as part of that festival’s observance of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I.

Speaker

Thomas Hardy never served in the infantry, nor did he visit the battlefields of southern Africa where the Boer War unfolded. Rather, with the intuitive leap of a dramatist, Hardy creates an everyman character. That nameless soldier emerges through the diction and syntax of the poem. The poem uses slang terms—“sat us down” (Line 3), “nipperkins” (Line 4), “‘list” (Line 13), “traps” (Line 15)—that reflect the speaker’s working-class background, as does his offer in the closing line to lend a stranger at a bar a “half-a-crown” (Line 20), a modest sum.

The poem uses moments when the speaker loops back on what he has said to suggest a mind in conflict. These moments mimic someone struggling to come to terms with a difficult reality, which is compounded by Hardy’s use of the double dash between and within lines. For example, Lines 9-11 capture the rhythms and phrasing of the soldier as he tries to explain his thoughts, as much to himself as to some presumed audience: “I shot him dead because— / Because he was my foe, / Just so” (Lines 9-11). The passage is inelegant, clumsy, and repetitive as Hardy’s common man struggles with his thoughts. Perhaps nothing so reveals the dilemma of Hardy’s working-class soldier than the exclamation point in the final stanza: “[Q]uaint and curious war is!” (Line 17). That punctuation reflects a man unable or unwilling to explore the depths of the moral questions he is raising and content to fall back on such glib vagaries, the exclamation point suggesting an uneasy, faux sense of contentment and closure.

The Past Perfect Subjunctive (“Had + Past Participle”)

In “The Man He Killed,” verb tense and mood serve a thematic function. The first stanza of the poem is cased in the past perfect subjunctive, and the conditional auxiliary verb “had” is used at the opening of the speaker’s critical meditation: “Had” (Line 1) he met the stranger he killed in a tavern, it would be an entirely different scenario.

The use of the past perfect verb tense alternates with the simple past tense as the speaker vacillates between hypothetical camaraderie and a nightmarish reality. His willingness to conceive of an entirely different encounter demonstrates the speaker’s attempts to justify his actions. Had he met the same man in virtually any other setting, he assures himself he would have acted as he normally does—kindly and generously. The past perfect subjunctive allows him to temper the moral and ethical condemnation he would otherwise receive for the killing while allowing him to rationalize his barbaric act. The juxtaposition of these verb tenses and moods opens up the poem to an imaginary dimension beyond the claustrophobia of the battlefield, a dimension the reader realizes offers the speaker the only comfort he can find.