Being "obliged" to answer someone is a strange kind of duty, and the poem begins by admitting it. "We are obliged to answer a troll" sets up a trap: reply, and you feed the thing; stay silent, and you leave its claims standing. The title, "In bad faith," names the problem. The troll's remarks are not offered honestly, yet the speaker's "we" feels it has to respond anyway. Everything after that first line shows what such a response is up against.
What follows is a string of reported statements rather than a scene. Nobody speaks directly, and there are no quotation marks. We get only things "told" and "reported": that winter "did not prove / so bad as reported," that "he had no opportunity / of speaking his mind." The word "reported" appears in the poem's own text, and the whole piece works like reported speech, secondhand and slightly distorted. We never learn who "he" is. He may be the troll, or someone the troll talks about, and the slide from "a troll" to "he" is left unexplained. That vagueness is part of the poem's point. In a bad-faith exchange it is hard to say who is claiming what, or who is hurt.
The poem's best move is its change of register. It opens on the blandest subject there is, the weather, with a mild, even smug claim that winter wasn't so terrible after all. By the last line we have reached "love for the gallows." The poem never explains this drop from small talk to execution, and that gap is where its meaning sits. The troll's style, as the poem catches it, is to make a trivial contradiction, claim to be silenced, and then, "till 12 o'clock at night," when the argument has worn everyone down, "making an end of right and wrong." That phrase is the poem's sharpest. It describes a conversation that does not refute moral distinctions but wears them away. The final line then gives the motive, and it is not conviction but "love," a perverse appetite for the spectacle of punishment.
The construction supports this. The three stanzas run three lines, two lines, three lines, so the short middle stanza feels like a pause or a held breath before the descent. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, so the sentences run into each other and we cannot tell where one claim stops and the next starts. The poem has no rhyme and no steady meter. Lines range from five syllables ("so bad as reported") to eight or nine, and the rhythm shortens and stalls in the middle of the poem. But there are quieter sound links. "Troll" and "told" share their opening and their closing consonants, as though the creature had already been named by the act of telling. "Night" ends one line and "right" sits inside the next, so a sound that ends the night begins the moral argument. The last line closes on "gallows," a falling two-syllable word, which gives the poem a heavy, final thud.
The diction is also worth a look. "Obliged," "opportunity," and "reported" sound formal, almost clerical, and "did not prove so bad" has an old-fashioned ring, where "prove" means "turn out." That stiff, slightly antique voice may be intended, since the language sounds as if it came from older prose, though that is an inference from the wording and not something the poem tells us. Set against these Latinate words are the short, blunt ones: "night," "love," "gallows." The politeness of the first half makes the violence of the ending more disturbing, because the speaker's formal manners are the same manners that get dragged into the argument.
The poem matters because it captures a recognisable modern dilemma without lecturing about it. It never says what a troll is or condemns him outright. It lets the shift from weather to gallows show how bad faith works: it begins with something trivial and ends with someone wanting a hanging. A reader is left to consider whether the obligation in line one is really a duty, or whether it is the bait.