Summary

“The Man He Killed” opens with Hardy’s speaker contemplating how a different setting and circumstances, “[meeting] / by some old ancient inn,” would have changed the relationship between, “he and I,” the titular man he is responsible for killing and himself, respectively (1-2). Rather than the encounter resulting in death and the destruction of one of the two men, “We should have sat us down to wet / Right many a nipperkin” (3-4). Rather than enmity and destruction, the speaker imagines that a companionship akin to friendship would have sprung up between the two men sitting down to share a drink.

However, with the second stanza, the speaker immediately shifts away from the hearty and comforting image of camaraderie that opens Hardy’s poem. The reality is that instead of at first meeting at “some old ancient inn,” their encounter occurs while they are “ranged...