"The Man He Killed"

Thomas Hardy is the writer of the poem, “The Man He Killed”. Hardy was born in 1840 in a small English village, called Higher Bockhampton. Hardy passed away in 1928 at a place called Max Gate. Max Gate was a house that Hardy had built when he was married to his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford. This house was just a few miles away from where he was born. “Hardy’s youth was influenced by the musicality of his father, a stonemason and fiddler, and his mother, Jemima Hand Hardy, often described as the real guiding star of Hardy’s early life”(Poetry Foundation). The musical talent of his father really caught Hardy’s attention. After seeing his father chase his dream, he followed in the same footsteps. When Hardy passed away he had not only written about a thousand poems, he also wrote 14 novels and 3 volumes of short stories. He is best known for his lyric poetry.

“The Man He Killed” is a poem whose main them is war. It has a very interesting outlook on war as a whole. The speaker of the poem is a soldier recalling a time when he killed a man in battle. The first stanza of the poem discuses the meeting of two people, that actually did not occur. We know that this meeting did not occur this particular way because the character says “Had he and I but met”(Thomas Hardy), which is saying that that is not how they really met. At this point in the poem we are not sure who the speaker is or who he is talking to. We do know, by the tone of the speaker, that the meeting was probably not a very good one.

Moving on down to the next few lines of the poem we find out who are characters are and where they are at. They are soldiers in war, and yes they are enemies. This makes the first stanza of the poem so much clearer now. By the title of the ...

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... that same man on the battlefield, you would kill him. These last few lines also refer back up to the first stanza. He talks about meeting a man at a bar. Since we know now what he is talking about, we can go back to look and examine it.

At the end the soldier states that in war you shoot your “fellows” down. The word fellow implies friends. This line is very important to see and understand the soldier’s view on war. In this poem Hardy creates a new outlook on war. Probably one in which very few people have ever thought of.

Works Cited

Shmoop Editorial Team. "The Man He Killed Summary." (n.d.): n. pag.

Web.

"Thomas Hardy." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2014. Web. 13

Apr. 2014.

Thomas R., Greg Johnson, and Laurence Perrine. "The Man He Killed."

Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense. 11th ed. Australia:

Thomson Wadsworth., 2012. 681. Print.