Theme : Loss of humanity

(1) Write the summary of the poem.(2) Discuss the theme of the poem.(3)

Edwin Brock’s ‘Five Ways to Kill a Man’ is sharp, colloquial, shrewd, direct, humorous and highly original. The unforgettable blend of the laconic and the serious in this poem is what became instantly recognisable as the Brock voice and makes it his one of the most anthologised poems of the last three decades. It is among the best-known poems of the twentieth century.

The poet satirically mocks at the dehumanisation of man (loss of humanity in mankind) with every passing era which forms the main theme of the poem. It coldly but chronologically describes the different ways man has used, from the ancient times till the twentieth century, to kill other human beings for his selfish motives. The chronological reference to the events not only shows progressive inhumane character through the ages but also shows that it was the final method, leaving a man to live in the twentieth century, was the most cruel and torturous.

Man’s inborn natural instinct is to fight, to kill and to destroy. The methods he has used include crucifixion, lancing, gassing, bombing and neglecting him to die passively on his own. Therefore, wars are an innate but obsolete part of human nature. Each stanza of the poem deals with one method of killing and each one further creates a distance between the killer and the victim, till in the last stanza there remains neither the killer nor the victim, but only a living death.

In the first stanza, the poet says that there are many ‘cumbersome’, that is, complicated (here) ways to kill a man.One can make the victim carry a long piece of wooden cross to the top of a hill It alludes to crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It was an unwieldy and clumsy method to torture and kill him.

The second stanza describes the wars fought for the sake of crown and honour in the medieval age. It is a reference to the Wars of Roses (1455 – 1485), a series of dynastic wars fought between the House of Lancaster and York, for the throne of England.

The third stanza moves on to the First World War. The poet says that this period did not require

The fourth stanza is an allusion to the modern day warfare with the advent of the much more technologically advanced weapon systems like the aeroplane and the atomic bomb. It shows the reader how easy it is to kill and how little thought it takes. He says that such warfare required one to fly above the heads of the victims and killing them without ever having known or seen them. This is an obvious reference to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan by the USA during the Second World War. He says that this required ‘an ocean to separate you’ referring to the cultural gap between America and Japan; ‘two systems of government’, referring to the difference in the administrative systems of the two countries;

In the last stanza of the poem, the poet argues that the methods described in the first four stanzas were all too ‘cumbersome’ to kill a man and these ways need not be adopted. He criticises the era of twentieth century by saying that far ‘simpler, direct and much more neat’ method was to leave the victim to live somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. There is neither killer nor victim, but just a living death. Here, the poet is referring to the miserable conditions after the Second World War which overwrought the twentieth century, which included poverty, hunger, malnutrition, diseases, religious intolerance and joblessness. In such conditions, man has been inflicted with pain everyday in order to survive and in doing so, he was dying a slow death.