It's not everyday you read an anti-war poem that takes place in a bar. But Thomas Hardy isn't an everyday kind of poet. And the Boer War wasn't your everyday war either.
Way back in the late 1800s, after mastering the novel like nobody's business, Hardy thought he'd give poetry the old college try. In 1898, he published his first volume of poems, and not long after that, the Boer Wars broke out in South Africa. What do these two things have to do with each other?
Well, Hardy did not like what he saw, and thought poetry might help him air his dovish beef with the world. And that's why, more than a century later, we're sitting here reading his scathing poetic critique of war—"The Man He Killed."
See, the Boer Wars were not your mama's wars. They were incredibly violent, and the Brits committed more than their share of atrocities, including rounding up the Boers (South African farmers) in concentration camps, where many perished. Almost 100,000 lives were lost in total, and while the war had widespread support in Great Britain, it didn't exactly boost their rep elsewhere.
To Hardy, this was all a little much. So he penned "The Man He Killed" to reveal the war for what he thought it really was—a messy, seemingly pointless conflict between groups who shouldn't really be at odds in the first place. The poem is piercing in its irony, haunting in its imagery, and more than a little depressing in general. And we can't help but wonder what Hardy would have made of World War I, which made the Boer Wars look like a bar fight.