Battlefield

The battlefield on which the speaker kills a man is the primary setting of Hardy’s poem. The speaker’s language characterizes the battlefield as a location of callous inhumanity – the very arrangement of the battlefield, with the speaker and the man he ends up killing “ranged as infantry, / And staring face to face” makes possible the mental conception of an us/them opposition that facilitates the killing of a supposed enemy (5-6). After all, this arrangement on the literal opposite sides of a battlefield, like black and white pawns on different sides of a chessboard, gives rise to deadly consequences: “I shot at him as he at me, / And killed him in his place” (7-8). As such, Hardy’s depicts the battlefield as the ultimate space of the war machine’s antagonism.

Inn

Throughout “The Man He Killed,” Hardy’s speaker contrasts the battlefield with “some old...