The Man He Killed

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1902

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning (1842)

An iconic example of dramatic monologue, this poem, one of Hardy’s favorites, allows a Duke to speak in praise of on oil portrait of his deceased wife. The more he talks, however, he reveals that he is a ruthless and mercenary hypocrite who abused his wife and was perhaps responsible for her death.

“Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen (1918)

“I am the man you killed”—in Owen’s dark perception of the fate of a World War I soldier haunted after death by the ghost of one of the many men he killed in pointless battles, the poet, influenced by the uproar that greeted Hardy’s antiwar poem, reveals the horrors of war. The soldiers from different sides share the same damnation.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1915)

A far more intricate experiment in dramatic monologue that represents how the next-generation Modernists expanded on Hardy’s generation’s embrace of new forms. This poem, in which a would-be poet on his way to an afternoon tea comes to reveal his own timid and bookish nature, shows how, without authorial intrusion, a character—here an erudite and pretentious grad student—can reveal his deepest yearnings and his most tragic flaws.

Further Literary Resources

“Hardy and Owen on World War One: Explications” by William Wright (2022)

Wright explores how Hardy’s Boer War poem captures the melancholy tone of much British antiwar poetry generated by the catastrophic trauma 20 years later of World War I in a comparison of “The Man He Killed” with Wilfred Owen’s bitter lyric “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Both poems use the concept of a first-person narrator-soldier to implode the notion of the grandeur and nobility of war.

“The Man He Killed” by Femi Oyebode (2014)

Using data drawn from soldiers returning from the first and second Gulf Wars and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, this analysis (which originally appeared in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry) explores how Hardy dramatically captures the profound confusion and moral dilemma typical of soldiers with recurring bouts of PTSD. The article focuses on the closing stanza when the speaker reveals his disturbing and persistent debate within himself between what he has done and who he is.

“A Study in Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ and Hardy’s ‘The Man He Killed’” by H. B. Abdulsalm (2020)

In finding significant thematic echoes in Owen’s bitter antiwar poem from a generation after Hardy, the article shows how Hardy, as a product of late Victorian science and culture, reflects his interest in the psychology of the soldier, whereas Owen, a soldier experiencing the war firsthand, is more interested in portraying war itself, specifically denying it any nobility or purpose. In both, the poets explore the concept of the Other in warfare and how the idea of an “enemy” is an artificial construct.

Listen to the Poem

Robert Tilleard reads “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy

Although Billy Bragg’s transcription of Hardy’s poem into a folk ballad is intriguing and reveals the poem’s darker qualities, among the many YouTube recitations of Hardy’s poem, the most effective is the most direct, the interpretation in keeping with the immediacy and intimacy of Hardy’s own dressed-down dramatic monologue. Robert Tilleard, a British poet of some renown who enjoys creating original short films of iconic British poems, recorded a version of Hardy’s poem in 2022. His voice aspirates at the right moments and lingers over the last stanza.