Poetry Short Critical Paper

How simple this poem looks, yet how wonderful it is! The story and scene are easy to understand: it is 1902, and we are in a pub somewhere in Dorset. We are overhearing a man who has returned from fighting in the South African War (the Boer War) describing his experience of killing one of the enemy.

When this poem was first published, it had a note preceding it, which clarified the scene: "SCENE: The settle of the Fox Inn, Stagfoot Lane. CHARACTERS: the speaker (a returned soldier) and his friends, natives of the hamlet."

The poem is, of course, a dramatic monologue - that is to say, Hardy is not speaking in this own voice, but ventriloquizing the voice of an ordinary working man, swept up into the Boer War, and now thinking about the fighting he saw in South Africa and what the whole experience has meant to him. (For this reason, you might compare the use of the speaking voice to that in "My Last Duchess", "The Laboratory", or "Ulysses".) Basically, the experience of the war has left the man confused: he doesn't really know what the war was about, or why the Government decided to go to war. He does know that (though he puts it light-heartedly) he was shocked to have shot one of the enemy dead, because, as he realizes, the person killed could just as easily have been himself. He's an ordinary working-class man, who just happened to sign up for the army: the man he killed, on the other side, was probably just like him - the war doesn't make sense at all. What was the point of it?

Like many liberals at the time, neither Hardy nor his wife Emma approved of the South African War - it gave Hardy qualms about the whole business of the British Empire and what it was really about. The Boers (i.e. South Africans of Dutch descent) just seemed to be defending their homes and land against the English: why did the English want to keep control in South Africa so strongly? Were we just after the gold and diamond mines? (Gibson, 9)

As the war broke out in 1899, Hardy cycled the fifty miles over to Southampton to watch the troop ships departing, and, as things went badly wrong for the English in the early phase of the war, so he wrote a ...