war photographer and remains

Introduction

• Both explore devastating psychological impact of war

• Armitage shows solider tormented by guilt- fragmented structure, violent imagery to reflect trauma

• Duffey shows war photographer- struggles to reconcile horrors

• Armitage wrote for ‘Not Dead’- documentary impact of war on soldiers- awareness of PTSD, raise awareness

• Duffy- picture of Napalm girl- poet laureate, controversy over war photography

Point 1

Both poems present the lasting psychological trauma caused by war, showing how it continues to affect individuals

• ‘His bloody life in my bloody hands’

  • Literal bloodshed, metaphorical guilt

  • Haunted and psychologically scarred

• ‘A strangers features twist before his eyes, a half formed ghost’

  • ‘Twist’- painful connotations + memories

  • ‘Half- formed ghost’- paradoxical metaphor, psychological haunting, personal, emotional trauma

Point 2

Armitage and Duffy use contrasting settings to show how war invades the peace of ordinary life, making trauma inescapable

• ‘Then I’m home on leave. But i blink/and he bursts again’

  • Caesura- quickly thrown into trauma, should be finality, enjambment- separate reality from memory, plosives (violent sound)

  • ‘Blink’- memory is involuntary and uncontrollable, merging of reality and memory

• ‘Rural England. Home again/to ordinary pain’

  • Oxymoron ‘ordinary pain’- emotional distance between those who experience war + those who only witness

  • ‘Rural England’- problems trivial, contrasts with horrific war scene

Point 3

Both poets use structure and form to reflect emotional disintegration and the struggle to process war

• ‘Sort of inside out’

  • enjambment and free verse

  • mirrors fragmented state of minder, memory as uncontrollable and chaotic, stream of consciousness

• ‘Spools of suffering set out in ordered rows’

  • tightly structured regular stanzas and controlled rhyme scheme

  • attempt to bring order to horror he captures, neatness cannot control trauma, l