The Man He Killed

“The man he killed;” Thomas Hardy wrote this poem in 19th century England. This might be a hard poem to understand for us, but it is pretty clear that this poem is about a war. Thomas Hardy is trying to tell us something through this beautiful poem. We will use this poem to figure out why the narrator kills the man, whether he feels like he did the right or wrong thing, and how the narrator feels about the war itself.

First, let’s see why the narrator, Thomas Hardy, kills the man. Although it seems that the narrator would not have killed the man at first “"Had he and I but met by some old ancient inn, we should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin!”, he ended up doing it anyway. Under different conditions they probably would have grabbed a few drinks. The passage “And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, and killed him in his place” provides us with the evidence necessary to know that the narrator ended up killing the man. At some point the narrator comes face to face with the man and both of them pull out their guns to shoot each other. From what the

The narrator justifies the killing by saying, it was his enemy “I shot him dead because — because he was my foe.” The narrator seems to feel that he did the right thing by killing the man. His reason for is because the man was his enemy, and that reason seems to be enough for that moment. The narrator seems to be in a conflict with himself because of that reason. It should not be enough for someone to get killed because it is one’s enemy, simply because the man did not do anything wrong. “Just so: my foe of course he was; that’s clear enough; although.” Looking at the situation from the war point of view he did the right thing, but looking at it from the view of a soldier or a man he did not do the right thing. The entire situation is just so senseless to the