Sunday, May 5, 2019

Help with an explicaton of "Five Ways to Kill a Man" by Edwin Brock? line by line explanation

I've
enclosed the poem here for you to look at
as I go through the different elements of it. If you
take a step back from it
and look at it as a whole, you'll note that in the beginning of the
poem,
with the Christ reference, the killing was very personal. There are people there at
the
site and they are actually touching Jesus. As you move down, the killing
gets increasingly
impersonal, to the point at the end where one is able to
kill a lot more people with no hands
on. The killer needn't look the person
in the eye as he is doing it. The impersonal nature of it
allows someone to
kill a lot more easily. At the end, however, there is an ironic twist, in

which the poet says the easiest way to kill someone is to leave him alone. In that
manner, I
think he's saying that we are meddlesome by nature and we need to
do this to survive
ourselves.

There's a link at the bottom
that will help you get started with
your line by line explication of the
poem. Hopefully, this description will give you a head
start.


There are many cumbersome ways to kill a

man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill
and nail him
to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of
people
wearing sandals, a
cock that crows, a cloak
to
dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to
hammer the nails
home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped
and
chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal
cage he
wears.
But for this you need white horses, />English trees, men with bows and
arrows,
at least two flags,
a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet
in.


Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow
gas
at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with
ditches,
not to
mention black boots, bomb craters,
more
mud, a plague of rats, a dozen
songs
and some round hats made of
steel.

In an age of aeroplanes,
you may fly />miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one
small
switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you,
two
systems of
government, a nation's scientists, />several factories, a psychopath and
land
that no-one needs
for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways

to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that
he is living
somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and
leave him there.


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