In Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed”, the actual speaker the story originated from is a soldier who kills an opposing soldier, but since the whole poem is in quotation marks, the speaker might be a person who has heard of the soldier’s stories. In the poem, the soldier talks about what would happen if he had met the opposing soldier in a bar and how they will have a great time. Instead, the soldier is enlisted in the army and is on the battlefield because he was out of work just like the opposing soldier he shot. At the end of the poem, the soldier questions the irony of the war and how things can be different “had he and I but met/By some old ancient inn”. The text shows that there is a central tension, imagery, and several poetic devices.