The Man He Killed Flashcards
The Man He Killed: Who is the poet?
Thomas Hardy
The Man He Killed: How can the metre be described?
Lines 1,2,4: Iambic trimetre
Line 3: Iambic tetrametre
What is a quatrain?
A stanza with four lines
The Man He Killed: What suggests the narrator’s guilt?
Dashes, repetition, semi colons
‘I shot him dead because -/Because he was my foe/Just so: my foe of course he was;/That’s clear enough; although’
The Man He Killed: What shows that the narrator has partaken in a war?
‘Ranged as infantry’
‘I shot at him as he at me’
‘Because he was my foe’
'’list’ (enlist)
‘Quaint and curious war is!’
The Man He Killed: What are some quotes about class?
‘Ranged as infantry’ - infantry men die in the largest numbers
‘Was out of work - had sold his traps -‘
The Man He Killed: What contextual insight can you provide?
Written about the aftermath of the Boer War, where Britain had an unfair advantage
The Man He Killed: How does the metre provide irony to this poem?
Metre is usually associated with great, serious poems, but this lower class man does not speak with profound insight
The Man He Killed: What is the rhyme pattern?
ABAB
The Man He Killed: What words are repeated and what is the effect?
Repetition of ‘foe’: shows that this name has been fed to the man; he has no real grudge against the man he killed
Repetition of ‘shot’: trying to get to grips with the cold fact that he has killed a man
The Man He Killed: What does the repetition of words and punctuation in stanza 3 show?
The narrator is stumbling over his words, or muttering to himself, as he can’t rationalise what he has done
The Man He Killed: Why does the narrator believe that the man is similar to himself?
He is aware that the lower classes are the most affected by war
He believes that in a different situation, they’d get on together just fine
He feels guilty and is trying to comprehend the situation by relating to the man
The Man He Killed: How is the pace of war presented in this poem?
Everything happens in the second stanza (‘staring/shot/killed’) to show how rapid war can be - the rest of the poem is the narrator talking through his thoughts
The Man He Killed: In stanza 5, what is the effect of the narrator’s description of war?
‘Yes; quaint and curious war is!’
He makes this understatement as juxtaposition to the rest of the poem to show that he is not ready to properly talk about how he has been affected
The Man He Killed: What happens in each stanza?
- What it could have been
- Killing the man on the battlefield
- Struggle to rationalise
- Imagining the man’s life
- Final thoughts parallel the first stanza (‘inn/bar’)
