The Man He Killed

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1902

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Battlefield

The poem juxtaposes two symbolic settings, the battlefield across which the two soldiers stand and the “ancient inn” (Line 2) that the speaker imagines as he struggles to understand why he killed a complete stranger. The battlefield is well-known to the literary tradition: It is a public scape defined by competition, violence, heroism, and opposition, and it is sustained by governments and rulers. It is an environment defined by artificial boundaries that are in turn sustained and defended by licensing murder. The speaker visualizes the battlefield for the reader. Described in the recent past, it is a place where soldiers are “ranged” (Line 5) like objects, positioned “face to face” (Line 6) in confrontation, and where killing takes place: “I shot at him as he at me / And killed him in his place” (Lines 7-8). On the battlefield, lines are drawn, a foe is a foe, and everyone understands the rules of engagement. The poem disrupts this image of the battlefield as heroic, masculine, and straightforward by introducing an alternative setting—the inn, a setting with vastly different connotations.

The Ancient Inn

In contrast with the battlefield, the ancient inn is warm and inviting, symbolizing everything the battlefield rejects: easy camaraderie between men, warm fellowship among strangers, and community conviviality uncomplicated by irony. For the speaker, pondering how odd it is to have killed a man whom he would buy drinks for in a tavern, the inn represents an alternative perception of humanity, one illuminated by kindness and generosity, and one that sees the opposition of “friend” and “foe” as unworkable and even intolerable. The inn represents that empathetic impulse, constant in Hardy’s perception of the working class, to reach out and forge impromptu friendships that create communities. Presenting an alternate space for masculinity, these communities bind individuals in fellowship to the point where, as the speaker decides in the closing stanza, he would even be willing to lend money to a man who was just a short time ago a stranger. That the inn is described as “ancient” suggests Hardy sees this need for communion and friendship as old, or older, than the drive to confront and kill one other; it is an immemorial element of humanity’s makeup.

The Gunshot

The admonishment not to kill is embedded in the moral framework of Judeo-Christianity itself and within the code of conduct prescribed by every culture’s system of law and order. But that law always comes with an asterisk, because as Hardy himself understands, as a committed agnostic and student of history, murder is justifiable if done in the name of the Church or the State.

War cannot be entirely understood by mass slaughter or battlefield casualties. Hardy takes the speaker to the aftermath of a single gunshot. Technically, this is a poem about a murder, about a single directed gunshot, fired at close range, intended to end the life of another person. That this gunshot takes places on a battlefield muddies the morality of the act and, in turn, creates a “quaint and curious” (Line 17) logic that makes the killing not only justifiable but heroic under the right circumstance.

Because the poem never identifies the war, and never attaches any greater sense of national idealism to the murder, the poem is left with the wonderland logic of that single gunshot. The speaker, who understands that at that moment it was literally kill or be killed, makes the case, “I shot him dead because— / Because he was my foe” (Lines 9-10). Hardy, although not a veteran, is not naive. The reality of war demands killing and the immodest exchange of gunfire.

The single gunshot creates the havoc of the speaker’s moral conflict as he struggles to understand it. In a broader sense, the gunshot also symbolizes the imposition of an artificial morality system that drives war itself: Were the speaker to shoot the same man with the same weapon in a tavern, he would be seen as ruthless and insane, and there would be significant legal repercussions. Thus, the gunshot symbolizes the tenuous (and decidedly amoral) logic of the battlefield where strangers kill each other “staring face to face” (Line 6).