Coup de grâce Coup de grâce A coup de grâce (; French for "blow of mercy") is a death blow to end the suffering of a severely wounded person or animal. It may be a mercy killing of civilians or soldiers, friends or enemies, with or without the sufferer's consent. Examples of "coup de grâce" include shooting the heart or head (typically the back of the skull) of a wounded, but still living, person during an execution or by humanely killing a suffering, mortally wounded soldier, in war, for whom medical aid is not available. In pre-firearms eras the wounded were finished with
The Death of a Soldier The Death of a Soldier "The Death of a Soldier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, "Harmonium." The poem uses free verse to describe the death of a soldier. The poem's longevity reinforces the naturalistic austerity of its depiction of death. One interpretive viewpoint asks whether Stevens is writing about any death, or rather, as Longenbach asserts, the death of the soldier—"and not an ambiguously 'fictive' soldier but Eugène Lemercier [the young French painter killed in 1915 whose letters were collected as "Lettres d'un soldat" and read by Stevens in the summer of 1917]." Lemercier was