Remains by Simon Armitage

What is the poem about?

Not about his own experience, but based on the true story of Guardsman Tromans, who was a machine gunner in the Iraq war in 2003

Where is the poem taken from?

-The poem is taken from the collection “The Not Dead”

-From 2008

It is a collection of poems about discharged servicemen

What is “Remains” about?

-“Remains” is about the after-effects of conflict

-Ultimately, it’s about the true horror of war, the indescribable horror of war

How does the poem begin?

“On another occasion, we get sent out”

-The poem begins mid-action

What is the effect of in medias res?

-The reader is immediately confused and lacking information because, clearly something’s gone before

-It builds empathy for the soldier as it helps the reader to understand the lack of ease that the soldiers would have felt joining a war zone

-It reflects the chaos and lack of control

How is repetition used to deflect blame?

“myself and somebody else and somebody else”

“All three of us open fire. Three of a kind”

-At the beginning, he doesn’t want to accept the lone blame for the event

How can “myself and somebody else and somebody else” be analysed?

• The repetition of “somebody else” is used to deflect the blame from the soldier alone

• The narrator makes it clear that others were involved to minimise his own role

• Syntactically, the line becomes dominated by the other soldiers, suggesting the narrator wasn’t the main culprit

How can “All three of us open fire. Three of a kind” be analysed?

The repetition of “three” again allows the narrator to feel that he’s not wholly to blame

How does the poem end?

“His bloody life in my boody hands”

• The shift to the pronoun “my” reflects his feeling of responsibility for what happened later in the poem

• The poem ends with the acknowledgement that the narrator is taking responsibility

How is the volta shown?

“Three of a king all letting fly, and I swear/ I see every round as it rips through is life”

-The enjambment is carried over two stanzas

-Armitage uses enjambment to show the life-changing moment when the soldier shot the looter

How is hope conveyed?

“Then I’m home on leave”

-The caesura suggests a sense of finality to this blunt sentence

-The narrator feels that going home will change things, though this doesn’t happen

What is the effect of the enjambment

-This break between the action causes the reader to stop

-It emphasises how this precise moment, as the soldier shot the looter, is the big moment of his life, arguably the volta

-The forced break of line and stanza reflects the broken man the soldier became after this event took place

How can “Then I’m home on leave” be analysed?

-Armitage uses a very short sentence with a full stop, which is emphasised by the use of enjambment in the rest of the poem

Why doesn’t “home” change things?

• To emphasise this, the next stanza repeats “probably armed, possibly not”- the same as line 4

• The motif of “probably armed, possibly not” creates a cyclical structure

• This suggests that the trauma the soldier has experience is inescapable

What are the two interpretations of the title?

• It suggests that the soldier has been used in the machine of war, all that is left isn’t good to anyone

• He’s a broken man mentally now

• “remains” also has connotations of someone’s death

• This possibly is a metaphor for the narrator’s emotional death

How is the looter refered to at “home”?

“blood-shadow”

• The “remains” here could be the constant reminder of the looter

• What remains is the memory of the looter “here in my head”

How are coloquialisms used?

“legs it up the road”

• The colloquialisms suggests that this event was an everyday event for the soldiers

• The casual language doesn’t remain throughout

How is language used at the volta?

“Every round rips through his life”

• As the soldier shoots the looter, the poem is filled with horrific imagery (e.g. this violent metaphor)

• Armitage’s juxtaposition of these contrasting types of language emphasises the after-effects of conflict on the soldier

How is vague language used?

“Sort of inside out”

• The vague language reflects the indescribable horror of war

• This suggests that, despite his army training, the narrator in the poem isn’t prepared for the harsh reality of killing someone

How is the looter treat after the incident?

“Tosses his guts […] in the back of a lorry”

• The treatment of the wounded man is described with the imagery of bin men

• The verb “tosses” shows a complete disrespect for the man, as if he is literally a piece of rubbish

How does the narrator deal with his PTSD?

“The drink and drugs won’t flush him out”

• The “him” in question is clearly the looter

• The verb “flush” has connotations of cleansing a sickness

How does the looter infultrate all aspects of the narrator’s life?

“Dug in behind enemy lines”

• The war imagery used whilst the narrator’s home on leave reflects the impact war has had on him

• At the beginning, he was at war using casual language expected to be used at home

• This emphasises the impact and shows how the effects are inescapable

How is sibilance used?

“sun-stunned, sand-smothered land”

• The sibilance emphasises the significance of the line, causing the reader to look closely at it

• In each compound adjective, there is a positive image pared with a sinister one

• This reflects how everything positive in his life has been tainted with the evil of war

What is the intertextual reference?

“My Bloody Hands”

This is a link to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”

What is the significance of “My Bloody Hands” in Macbeth?

• In Act 2, Scene 2, Lady Macbeth urges her husband to wash the blood from his hands

• He’s just killed the king, and she tells him “a little water clears us of this deed”, which links to the flushing

• In Macbeth, it is used as an extended metaphor, where the image of blood and water is used to show that murderous deeds are impossible to wash away