Justin Benner

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in Dorset, England, where his father Thomas (1811–92) worked as a stonemason and local builder. His mother Jemima was well-read, and she educated Thomas until he went to his first school at Bock Hampton at eight years old. He attended Mr. Last’s Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester. He learned Latin and showed academic potential. Hardy’s family was poor, and he couldn’t afford a university education. He became “homeschooled” and his formal education ended at the age of sixteen. This is when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architect. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King’s College London. Here he won awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. He made the switch to poetry later, according to poets.org:

He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years. Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication and Hardy was criticized for being too pessimistic and preoccupied with sex.

Hardy wrote quite a few war poems based off of World War 1 and The Boer Wars. “The Boer Wars was the name given to the South African Wars from 1880-1881 and 1899-1902 that were fought between the British and the descendants of the Dutch settlers (Boers) in Africa” (spartacus-educational.org). One poem he wrote based of these two wars was “The Man He Killed.” This is a relatively short poem at only five 4-line stanzas. The meaning of the poem says much more. The first stanza reads:

He starts out by introducing two characters. We have no names, all we really have is they exist. As a whole this first stanza is pointing out a more appealing outcome than what we are most likely going to get. He is saying here if these two had simply met in a bar they could have been drinking buddies and had a blast. But we can see from the tone of this stanza this will not be the case.

Hardy immediately cuts to the chase in the second stanza and reveals what the relationship between these two men actually is. They are both in the infantry. They are in the lowest possible ranks of the infantry since they are staring the enemy in the face. This tactic of literal lines of battle was extraordinarily common at the time. It was, however, on the decline since the American Civil War saw the introduction of trench warfare. So we see these two men are on opposite sides of the battlefield staring at each other. Then in lines 3 and 4 we see Hardy shoots at the other man and kills him. It is interesting to note Hardy mentions the fact the other man also shot. He could have said “I shot and killed him,” but instead he says he shot and the other man shot, too. Either man could have won the engagement, but it is really a role of the die — a very accurate statement for the period seeing as the rifled or smooth-bore musket would have been the weapon of choice when he wrote the poem.

In this stanza we begin to see Hardy have a mental crisis. It’s reasonable to believe he is asking himself questions like “why did I shoot?” or more specifically “why was he my foe?” You can see him questioning himself in the manner in which the 1^st and 2^nd lines are written. The dash separating a repetition of the word “because” shows Hardy is questioning his motivations. Even in lines 3 and 4 we see him reassuring himself that yes, he was a foe, of course he was. This is exactly how we sound when we’re reassuring ourselves of something.

We see here instead of arguing over whether he was actually a foe, he is trying to humanize his enemy. He starts off by thinking maybe he enlisted just because he could. Then in the latter lines he argues this guy he shot enlisted because he had no job and had no money. All he is doing is listing the possibilities for why a dead guy enlisted.

He finishes off the poem by a drastic understatement. He describes killing another person as old-fashioned and curious. This is quite the statement for someone who took 3 stanzas to figure out why he killed someone and then why they were in the battle in the first place. To summarize the last three lines, he is basically saying in war you kill people that at a bar you would buy a drink and become friends with. This is the true irony of war. We can see historical examples of soldiers overcoming this “kill or be killed” instinct. One is Christmas Day in WW1 when there was a temporary ceasefire to have Christmas. Perhaps too often we see everyone around us as enemies.

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