Critical analysis of poetry

¶ … Killing Shot to the Heart of the Rhetoric of the Pro-War Movement:

The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy

Often, 'poetry' is narrowly though popularly defined as the use of heightened or self-consciously poetic language to deal with a particular theme that exists outside of the realm of everyday life. Poetry is seen as impractical, as opposed to an essay, for instance, a written medium that directly engages on an intellectual level with issues of importance. However, Thomas Hardy's poem "The Man He Killed" powerfully punctures such notions of poetry being removed from the language and the issues of real life. The poem, through the use of colloquial rather than metaphorical language, captures the voice of a soldier who has just killed a member of the opposing army. The soldier expresses an inner humanity that exists beyond the empty rhetoric of national propaganda. However, Hardy also makes use of irony in the poem, because the reader is encouraged to see the absurdity of war that the soldier's 'common' voice cannot quite come to an understanding of. This use of colloquial language and irony in this dramatic monologue is the source of the poem's powerful thematic expose of the absurdity of modern warfare.

The colloquial, rather than heightened nature of the rhetoric of "The Man He Killed" begins with poem's first stanza. This stanza indicates to the reader that rather than speaking with his own voice, the poet has chosen to assume a fictional persona, of a common infantry soldier. This is what makes the poem a dramatic monologue rather than a lyric expression of the poet's inner feelings. Note that the title of the poem is "The Man He Killed," i.e. The man the soldier and speaker killed, rather than the poet. Then the poem immediately adopts the "I" voice, marveling that if the wounded man had only met the speaker-soldier: "We should have sat us down to wet/Right many a nipperkin!" (Lines 3-4) In other words, had the two enemy soldiers met one another under different circumstances, and not wearing enemy uniforms, they'd been able to have a drink together. The soldier's voice is conveyed by slang, such as nipperkin and wet as a way of discussing having a friendly drink.

Thus the poetic speaker intuitively understands the absurdity of warfare in the way the leaders of nations do not. Because of the fact that the men were wearing different uniforms, "...staring face-to-face, / I shot at him as he at me..." (Line 6-7) In other words, because they were wearing different clothes or uniforms, and met on the field of battle, they felt duty-bound to kill one another. The speaking soldier 'succeeded,' killing a man he did not hate at all. His sense of awareness of the horror of this action is increased slightly as the poet adopts a more elevated tone in this second stanza, in sharp contrast to the slang of the first passage. By beginning with colloquial language that establishes the speaker's voice, Hardy can switch to a slightly more poetic style in this second stanza.

Although the speaker is aware to on an intuitive level of irony that characterizes warfare, he is not as aware as either the poet or the reader of the passage. "I shot him dead because -- Because he was my foe, / Just so: my foe of course he was..." (Lines 10-11) The soldier attempts to convince himself that he was right, that the man was his foe. However, his repetition makes his convincing himself sound hollow, and establishes a sense of irony between what the reader and poet knows and what the speaker is attempting to convince himself. The speaking soldier sounds more true to his inner sense of morality when he images the reason why the man he killed enlisted in the opposing army. "He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, / Off-hand like -- just as I -- " (Lines 13-14) The speaker enlisted for mercenary, not nationalistic reasons. His sense that he and the man he killed in war were the same in their reasons for joining the army sounds more truthful than his earlier use of the word "foe" to describe the dead man, a word probably used in pro-war propaganda. The diction of lines thirteen and fourteen sound much more like the opening lines of the poem, like the speaker's natural diction, rather than the use of the word "foe." The fact that these lines are much more human underlines Hardy's point that war is cruel, and national leaders and war propaganda are often foolish and hollow, but human beings on an individual basis are fundamentally decent. This is most evident when people are acting on their natural sense of morality and speaking in their own natural language, rather than in the language of rhetoric.