The Man He Killed

1. Vocabulary
(20) Half-a-crown: The half crown was a denomination of British money worth half of a crown, equivalent to two and a half shillings (30 pennies), or one-eighth of a pound.

2. The repetition of because in the poem serves as a reassurance that the man has to make for himself. It seems as if he can’t really justify why he did it, and feels regret for doing so. His ‘clear’ reason is the most apparent way to explain why he killed someone – if someone’s your enemy, it makes it okay? Using ‘although’ shows the dispute he is having with himself. He can’t justify that killing the man was okay. Old ancient can be poetically justified in that the man believed that if he had maybe met the other before he wouldn’t have killed him.

3. The elevated thought in The Man He Killed is that when people are at war their duty is to fight for their countries by killing others. People kill people whom they know nothing about. The idea of this poem being that if it wasn’t for war; people could have companions outside the war of their nations. Hardy’s poem is an example of how a man who killed another feels remorse about it. The man thought that if the two had met in a bar earlier in time they could have actually been friends.