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Xiangyu Zhong

Mr. Leonard

Honors American Literature

30 September 2012

Poetry Response for “The Man He Killed”

War is motionless, crucial and mournful. Hundreds, thousands innocent people lose their lives just because several leaders say so. Soldiers, who are in the same ages, who would be good friends, have to against there wills to kill each other. Even in this peacetime, wars are still fighting, inhumanity still exists.

Thomas Hardy uses first person perspective in the poem to describe his internal emotional activity of a soldier after he killed a man, who is just like himself that they would go to a bar and have a drink (nipperkin) together. There is a transition of third person perspective in the title to first person perspective in the poem, which is more presuasive to get readers to be sympathy of what have just happened. With the voice of the man himself, I could see the battle field and the shooting happening right in front of me. They might be friends if the war did not start, however, they have to kill each other.

Hardy starts out with a peaceful description of having drinks with his fellow man in a bar. In contrast of that peaceful scene, him and the other same age man have to fight each other, just “because he was my foe.” He used “just” several times in the poem to show how irony the real life and the war is. War is “quaint and curious.” Soldiers did not want to fight each other in most of the wars. This poem seems like a man explains why did he kill his opponent, but actually, it is “begging” for the peace around the world. It is obvious and unquestionable that opponents have to kill each other, but killing a man who you do not know at all who is just like you is crucial and brutal. I can feel the inside guilt of that man, who thinks himself as a murderer instead of a hero. It is very ironic. War is ironic, hateful and inhuman.

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