Poetry Analysis

Five Ways to Kill a Man
by Edwin Brock
Through the open Window (page 48)

Edwin Brock was a British poet and grew up in South London and passed away in the year of 1997. He said that much of his writing was about his family relationships, his marriages, and children. It would be interesting if his family inspired this particular poem. It was the title poem of his book that published in 1990, and has been critically acclaimed for it's unique tone. The attempt to simplify it's complexity, the poem is a list of five ways to kill, and the first four are cumbersome ways to kill.

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. 

Each of the first four technique's symbolize a death of it's time, beginning with the crucifixion of Jesus.

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.

I find how it's listed, like it doesn't need emotion to say, to be eerie. It's as if the death of Jesus, a knight slain in battle, the deaths of thousands in WWI and the crippling power of today's technology can be listed like your needs at a grocery store. Then again, some of those lives were taken down just as quick as a grocery list. Edwin then ends his poem with a way to kill that's much more simple.

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.

This final method of killing a man is what puts that final emphasis on the original four. This final way makes my head spin in attempt to solidify Edwin's message because I see multiple perspectives. Is it just a shot to the present century when he wrote this? Does he see the twentieth century to be the darkest of all mankind? Did the value of a human being crumble? Did one life hold more worth back when a single fighter would be armoured in a valiant steel suit? Edwin certainly forced me to look within and see the present I live in. I love this thought-provoking poem; it leaves quite an impact.

Cum ber some
adjective

• large or heavy and therefore difficult to carry or use; unwieldy.
• slow or complicated and therefore inefficient.