The Man He Killed
1.
“Half-a-crown”
is a money piece, in this line, he’s saying he would lend it to the man he
killed if they’d met on better terms.
2.
He uses the word
‘because’ twice in one stanza when he is trying to justify his actions to the
reader, when in reality, he doesn’t understand any better than the reader does.
Since the word ‘although’ comes at the end of a stanza, your voice has a half
pause, and the use of enjambment gives this word extra weight. It’s like he’s
having a conversation with you, and then suddenly realizes his argument might
be flawed, and rethinks his words. I think the words ‘old’ and ‘ancient’ may be
referring to the speaker’s past. He might be using this metaphorical hyperbole
as a symbol for his life before the war, as in, if they had met somewhere he
would’ve been before he began killing, maybe they would’ve been friends.
3.
I don’t think
this is necessarily true, not in all circumstances. Hardy’s poem is about an
experience that causes turmoil for the everyday man who found himself in a bad situation.
“The Man He Killed” isn’t a classic, or elevated, poem, it’s a man telling the
audience about someone he killed in cold blood- someone who he may have been
friends with! Poetry is the telling of experience, regardless of the amount of
sophisticated language.
The Flea
1.
Preceding the
first line, the woman in this situation is denying a man what he wants (sex),
and he is asking why she won’t since she gives him everything else. Between the
first and second stanza’s, he is making his argument that their blood is already in the
flea together, when she threatens to kill the flea (Though use make you apt to kill me) he says that by doing it, she
would be killing both of them as well since they now live inside the flea.
Between the second and third stanza, she kills the flea (Cruel and sudden, hast thou since…). During the third stanza, the
male character tells her that by sleeping with him, she would loose the same
amount of innocence as she did by killing the flea, which is none.
2.
The speaker and
the woman seem to be unmarried (probably a sin at the time) but dating anyway. Even
though they’ve been together and love each other, she is still denying him what
he wants most: sex, and that’s what they are arguing about here. She kills him
in the third stanza by murdering the flea that their blood is mingling in,
meaning that he isn’t actually dead, but she regrets giving into his pleas.
3.
MARK but this flea, and mark in this, Look at this flea,
How little that which thou deniest me is, You deny me so little, why this?
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, The flea takes blood from both of us.
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be And I want our blood too mix like it is inside the flea.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said What the flea does isn’t
shameful,
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead So why is shameful for us to do the same thing?
Yet this enjoys before it woo, It
enjoys the benefits of you before marriage,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two; And helped itself to me without consent.
And this, alas ! is more than we would do But even that is more than we would do.
The male character is comparing sex to the feeding of a flea off both
of them.
4.
I think he is using the line “parents grudge, and you” to paint a
picture of the inside of the flee; a dark, romantic place where the two
lovers can go without the wrath of their parents finding them.
5.
The living walls of jet represent the inside of the flea. If the
woman kills the flea, she will kill her boyfriend, herself, and insult the
institution of marriage.
6.
She thinks she is victorious when she crushes the flea, but the
boyfriend thinks differently. Changing his story, he now says that since she
killed the flea and suffered no harm, it must mean that having sex with him
wouldn’t be as shameful as she thought in the first place.
7.
I think she will keep denying him, and he may leave her because she
won’t listen to his “logic”.
8.
The Flea is a man persuading his girlfriend to sleep with him using
skewed logic and comparing their relationship to the feeding of a
blood-sucking insect. The Apparition, on the other hand, is a man attempting
to scare his girlfriend into having sex with him by telling her he will come
back and haunt her after death if she doesn’t give in now. The Flea is far
more cordial in the sense that that boyfriend wants his girlfriend to want to
sleep with him, not force her, and the other boyfriend is threatening her
until she submits.
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