Rhyme/Meter
Reading this poem is out loud is not at all dissimilar to reading verse by Dr. Seuss. It has the same lilting, sing-song quality of stories about green eggs or cats wearing hats. And yet it is about two men confronting each other in battle, two guns going off, and one man lying dead while the other spends the rest of life in melancholic reflection wondering why. The juxtaposition of the child-like qualities of the poem to its serious nature is one of creatively symbolic mechanisms by which the poet questions the maturity of war.
“Because”
The most significant moment in the poem is when the speaker recalls the shooting his foe. He explains “I shot him dead because-- / Because he was my foe.” The repetition of the word “because” is potent with anti-war symbolism as becomes the justification for the history of civilization in which so many men went to war just…because.
Quotation Marks
The narrative of the poem exists entirely within quotation marks. Although seemingly inconsequential, this changes the entire construction of the poem from a typical dramatic monologue. The speaker who is recalling the killing a man is not the speaker in the traditional sense: his monologue is being quoted by someone else. This creates a distancing effect in the man who was killed was shot by a soldier who is sitting in a bar telling the story to someone who has written it down and that is what is actually being read. This is another subtle symbolic anti-war mechanism which replicates the distance between the soldiers doing battle, generals planning the battle a safe distance, the politicians orchestrating the war from a place where the battles cannot even be seen and population receiving the propagandized version of those events taking place on the battlefield.
“Nipperkin”
The use of a very localized colloquial term for half-pint capacity container for liquor is a symbol of identification. It is necessary shorthand in a poem of such minimum length to convey simultaneously a certain type of person and certain sense of tone. Without knowing the meaning, the word is inherently comical just from its sound. Knowing the meaning quickly indicates a person familiar with drinking. The contextual utilization to describe what might have happened had this man met the man he killed under different circumstances all come together to symbolically implicate the person speaking as an accidental soldier rather than a dehumanized killing machine. This symbolic implication will later be literally confirmed when he reveals the circumstances of his decision to enlist. That he is not a professional soldier is significant.
Drinking Establishments
The opening stanza references an inn and this reference is replicated somewhat in the final stanza with the mention of a bar. Drinking establishments are thus signified as something akin to neutral ground: men who differ in any of the myriad ways which lead countries to war are themselves capable of meeting on such neutral territory as individuals and treating each other with respect and even finding common bonds. The symbolic juxtaposition here gains a tragic dimension with the man’s final contemplative observation about how “quaint and curious war is” when he notes meeting the exact same man on neutral ground might have resulted in helping him out with a little spare change whereas meeting him on the field of war results in putting a bullet into his body.
