The Man He Killed - Essay Example

In fact, this simple allusion to war provokes Hardy’s readers to explore deep into its meaning in terms of Hardy’s life. Indeed, Hardy wrote this poem in response to the British involvement in the Boer war (South African War) which started start on a mere dispute over the possession of a gold mine in South Africa. The poem has been written in a simple form of ballad which is endowed with a number of straightforward quatrains. The structure of this poem of Hardy is a “sawn-off syllogism” (Hardysociety 2).

The first quatrain starts with an ‘if’ expression which helps the poet to depict a traditional reality of civil. By depicting this reality of civilian life, the poet wants to reveal the irrationality and absurdity of war. In order to put the absurd reality of war, he starts the second quatrain with a ‘but’. Finally, Hardy confirms the absurdity of war with a word of emphasis, ‘yes’. It proves that at the end of the poem, he, more confidently, asserts that war is as “quaint and curious” on a man’s part as to “shoot a fellow down” in a bar.

In this quatrain, the narrator, in a conversational mood, addressed the readers as ‘you’ and says that war is such absurd. . This is the courtesy and way of civil life to entertain a stranger. But in a war, the reality gets turned totally upside down. Standing in lines (as the narrator says, “Ranged as infantry”) and “staring face to face”, he “shot at him as he at me,/ And killed him in his place” for no credible reason. In order to justify his act of killing the unknown man in war, he simply tells the readers that he was his enemy.

But he does not provide sufficient reason why he believes that he was his enemy. He simply emphasizes that he was his enemy, as he says, “I shot him dead because—/ Because he was my foe,/Just so: my foe of course he was;/That's clear enough; although” (Hardy). Such claim necessarily reveals the whimsical and absurd causes behind one’s participation in a war. Though the narrator says that he clearly knows that he was his enemy, his uncertain mood, as revealed through the word, ‘although’ as a separate addendum to his speech, indicates that he does not know clearly about his enemy.

He attempts to explain the enmity further. He tried to find out the man’s participation in the war. The narrator guesses that his enemy might have enlisted himself in the army aimlessly as he did: “He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,/ Off-hand like—just as I” (Hardy). Furthermore, he says that it may be an misunderstanding about the possession of property, as he says, “[I] had sold his traps—/ No other reason why” (Hardy). In the poem, Hardy has successfully used some imagery and symbols such as ‘bar’, ‘nipperkin’, etc to develop the antiwar theme of the poem.

It is remarkable that the dramatization of the narration of the poem starts from the very beginning of the poem. The title “the Man he had Killed” initially