THOMAS HARDY
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was born in Dorset, England, the son of a stonemason. Despite great obstacles, he studied the classics and architecture, and in 1862 he moved to London to study and practice as an architect. Ill health forced him to return to Dorset, where he continued to work as an architect and to write. Best known for his novels, Hardy ceased writing fiction after the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure in 1896 and turned to writing lyric poetry. We print a poem of 1902.
The Man He Killed
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin°!
5 “But ranged an infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
714
“I shot him dead because —
10 Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although
“He thought he’d ’list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
15 Was out of work — had sold his traps° —
No other reason why.
“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
20 Or help to half-a-crown.”
Thomas Hardy published this poem in 1902, at the conclusion of the Boer War (1899–1902, also called the South African War), a war between the Boers (Dutch) and the British for possession of part of Africa. The speaker of the poem is an English veteran of the war. Do you think such a poem might just as well have been written by an English (or American) soldier in World War II? Explain your response.
Characterize the speaker. What sort of man does he seem to be? Pay special attention to the punctuation in the third and fourth stanzas — what do the pauses indicated by the dashes, the colons, and the semicolons tell us about him? — and pay special attention to the final stanza, in which he speaks of war as “quaint and curious” (line 17). Do you think that Hardy too would speak of war this way? Why, or why not? Can you imagine an American soldier in the Vietnam War speaking of the war as “quaint and curious”? Explain.
Do you think we can reasonably say that the speaker of Hardy’s poem possesses free will? Explain your position.