Literature Library study guide
The Man He Killed
A former soldier tries to explain why he killed an enemy who might have become his friend, and his hesitant reasoning exposes how war turns circumstance into permission to kill.
- Literary form
- Dramatic monologue
- First published
- 1902
- Literary period
- Late Victorian and early twentieth-century poetry
- Region / tradition
- England and South Africa
- Original language
- English
What happens in this work?
The poem gives the floor to an ordinary former soldier. He imagines meeting the man he killed somewhere peaceful, such as an old inn. In that setting, the two men would probably have sat together and shared drinks. Nothing about their personalities would naturally make them enemies. The imagined friendship appears before the battlefield, so readers first understand the dead man as a possible companion rather than as a target. Hardy makes place and circumstance central from the first stanza.
The speaker then changes the setting. Instead of sitting across a table, the men face each other as infantry soldiers. Each shoots at the other, and the speaker survives. The basic action is simple, but the reason is not. When he tries to explain the killing, he repeats that the other man was his enemy. His pauses, restarts, and circular wording show that the official label does not fully satisfy him. Calling someone a foe explains the military rule, but it does not explain why these two similar individuals needed to become foes.
The speaker imagines that the dead man may have enlisted for the same reason he did: he was out of work, had sold his belongings, and joined without a grand political plan. This is only a guess, but it is a revealing guess. The speaker identifies with the other man more easily through economic insecurity than through national difference. Both may have entered armies because ordinary civilian life offered few options. War then placed them in opposing uniforms and turned that shared difficulty into a lethal encounter.
In the final stanza, the speaker calls war strange and points out the contradiction he cannot resolve. In battle, he shoots a man down; in a bar, he would buy the same man a drink; in ordinary life, he might lend the man money. The verbs for killing, treating, and helping are presented as possible actions toward one fellow human being. The moral difference comes from the setting and role rather than from a discovered difference in character.
The speaker never delivers a polished antiwar speech. He does not reject his army, describe himself as guilty, or explain the political conflict. His limited, awkward reasoning is the poem’s method. Hardy lets readers hear a person reaching the edge of the explanation available to him. He knows that the killing followed war’s rules, yet he also recognizes that those rules converted a possible friend into an enemy. The unresolved gap between those facts becomes more powerful than a slogan.
What was happening when it was written?
Hardy wrote the poem during the Second Boer War, fought from 1899 to 1902 between the British Empire and the two Boer republics in southern Africa. It first appeared in Harper’s Weekly on 8 November 1902 and later entered Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses in 1909. Hardy did not serve as the soldier speaking in the poem; this is a dramatic monologue in a created working-class voice. The war divided British opinion, and Hardy’s related poems repeatedly turn away from imperial glory toward ordinary people caught in violence. The speaker’s suggestion that both men enlisted because they lacked work places economic pressure beside patriotic explanations. Students should not assume every soldier had the same motive, but they should notice why this speaker imagines sameness rather than ideological hatred.
Who matters, and why?
The speaker
The unnamed veteran uses simple, conversational language and struggles to make his reason sound convincing. He is neither a confident killer nor a fully developed political critic. His pauses reveal a moral understanding forming while he speaks, perhaps for the first time.
The man he killed
The dead man has no direct voice, name, or confirmed history. The speaker imagines him as socially and economically similar to himself. That act of identification restores a civilian possibility that the battlefield label of enemy had temporarily erased.
The two possible civilian selves
The imagined men at an inn are versions of the soldiers under different conditions. They drink, talk, treat one another, and offer help. These unrealized selves show that friendship and violence depend partly on situations people enter rather than fixed personal hatred.
The military roles
Infantryman and foe are not individual personalities; they are positions within organized conflict. Once the men occupy those roles, shooting becomes expected. The poem asks whether a role can provide a complete moral reason for an irreversible act.
Big ideas to track
The accidental construction of an enemy
The men do not become opponents because of a personal dispute. Uniform, location, and command arrange them against each other. The poem reveals how the word enemy can hide the ordinary human similarities that remain present during combat.
Similarity across opposing sides
The speaker imagines shared poverty, spontaneous enlistment, sociability, and willingness to help. This does not erase national or political differences, but it makes the killing harder to justify as a clash between completely different kinds of people.
Economic pressure and limited choice
Unemployment and sold belongings suggest that enlistment may be less a heroic calling than a practical response to hardship. If both men entered war through limited options, the battlefield converts their shared vulnerability into mutual danger.
Rationalization and conscience
The speaker repeats the official reason—he killed an enemy—but his language will not move smoothly past it. The hesitation suggests conscience testing a rule that worked during combat but feels inadequate during reflection.
Place changes moral behavior
An inn encourages conversation and generosity; a battlefield requires alertness and violence. By changing only the place and role, Hardy changes the likely relationship completely. The poem asks how much moral responsibility belongs to individuals and how much to systems.
How the writing works
Dramatic monologue
Hardy creates a speaker whose words reveal more than he deliberately claims. Readers hear the soldier’s explanation, but they also interpret his repetition and gaps. This allows the poem to question war through character rather than an authorial lecture.
Conversational hesitation
Restarts, filler words, pauses, and repeated explanations make the voice sound as though it is thinking in real time. The broken reasoning is not poor craftsmanship; it is evidence that the speaker cannot make the official answer satisfy his conscience.
Simple quatrains and rhyme
Five four-line stanzas use a regular alternating rhyme pattern and short lines. The accessible, almost songlike structure contrasts with the moral complexity of killing. A neat form contains a conclusion that refuses to become neat.
Conditional grammar
The opening imagines what would have happened if the men had met elsewhere. Later guesses reconstruct why the dead man may have enlisted. These uncertain possibilities matter because the speaker knows the killing but must imagine the person he never learned to know.
Parallel verbs
The ending places shooting, buying a drink, and lending money within one compact comparison. The same person can receive radically different actions from the speaker. The parallel structure exposes how war changes the permitted verb without changing the human target.
Irony in the final description
Calling war merely strange sounds too mild for killing. That understatement can sound like the speaker lacks vocabulary for what he has realized. The gap between the small description and the large contradiction makes the closing more disturbing.
Moments to notice while you read
Stanza 1: the imagined inn
What to notice: Identify the grammatical signal that this meeting did not happen, then list the ordinary social actions the speaker imagines sharing with the other man.
Why it matters: Readers meet the two men first as possible companions. This order makes the later enemy label feel constructed by circumstance rather than natural or inevitable.
Stanza 2: face to face as infantry
What to notice: Compare the physical arrangement at a table with the opposing arrangement in battle, and track the parallel actions each armed man takes.
Why it matters: The stanza changes the setting and role while preserving human equality. Both men fire, but chance determines which one survives to tell the story.
Stanza 3: the explanation breaks down
What to notice: Read the pauses and repetitions aloud, then rewrite the speaker’s explanation as one clear sentence and decide what information is still missing.
Why it matters: The word foe identifies a battlefield category but does not supply a personal or moral cause. The speaker’s stammer makes that failure audible.
Stanza 4: an imagined shared reason
What to notice: Mark every sign of uncertainty in the speaker’s guess and every economic detail he uses to make the dead man resemble himself.
Why it matters: The speaker cannot know the man’s story, yet his first serious effort at understanding produces similarity. Economic pressure connects the supposed enemies more strongly than political belief separates them.
Stanza 5: kill, treat, or help
What to notice: Compare the possible actions toward the same fellow, the settings that permit each action, and the unusually mild phrase used to summarize war.
Why it matters: The ending leaves the contradiction unresolved. Readers must decide whether changing circumstances can explain the killing, excuse it, or merely show how war reorganizes ordinary morality.
Questions to test your understanding
Answer in your own words. Then point to a specific moment in the work that supports your answer.
- Why does the poem begin with a peaceful meeting that never occurred?
- What does the speaker know about the dead man, and what does he only imagine?
- How do pauses and repeated words reveal more than the speaker's official explanation does?
- Why might Hardy choose an ordinary working person's voice instead of a general, politician, or philosopher?
- How does unemployment complicate a simple story of patriotic enlistment?
- What changes when the men are placed in an inn rather than on a battlefield, and what remains the same?
- Does the speaker express guilt, confusion, criticism, emotional numbness, or a mixture of these? Support your answer from the voice.
- What responsibility belongs to the individual shooter, and what responsibility belongs to the system that labeled the other man an enemy?
- Why is the final description of war's strangeness more powerful than a direct statement that war is wrong might have been?
Read the work
Find an authorised text
The poem was first published in 1902 and is public domain. The linked university editions provide the complete text and explanatory notes.