Significance Of The Poem: Five Ways To Kill A Man
Stanza-Wise Points
Stanza 1: talks about the 'cumbersome' ways to kill a man, describes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, irony
Stanza 2: medical barbarism of the War of Roses between the Houses of Lancaster and York, 'celebration' of death
Stanza 3: WW1 and the gas warfare, further 'improvement' in the progress of killing human beings
Stanza 4: Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reference to Henry S. Truman as a psychopath
Stanza 5: portrays how scientific progress for the wrong cause will be the doom of humanity, the best thing to do is to 'leave a man who is living in the 20th century'.
Tone conveyed in the poem
Irony
Theme Potrayed
Dehumanisation
Corruption Of Humanity
'Man changes with time and his reasons for killing change as well."
Examples
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.
When Jesus himself was brutally killed, how can we expect them to treat the rest?
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 you banquet in.
One is 'celebrating' the death of another
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind allows, blow gas at him. But then you need a mile of mud sliced throughout 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.
Humans continue to advance in science and technology, and begin to use it for the wrong causes
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 seperate you, two systems of government, a nation's scientists, several factories, a psychopath and land that no one needs for several years.
Visual imagery of distance is portrayed
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.
With the way humanity is progressing, it's just best to leave a man where he is and let him gradually suffer