Remains

Who is "Remains" written by?

Simon Armitage

What is the context of Remains?

• Written for "The Not Dead" which is a Channel 4 documentary about the impact of war on soldiers returning home. It was created in order to raise awareness about PTSD and encourage more recognition of it in society

• Armitage interviewed a number of soldiers who had fought in wars, including the Gulf War. Remains seems to relate to the Gulf War as he mentions “desert sand”

What is the structure of Remains?

• Heavy enjambment - implies the speaker is unable to separate out events, causing the past to flow into the present

• Dramatic monologue - gives the poem a sense of being an account from memory in a flashback (a symptom of PTSD)

• Colloquial language - suggests the soldiers have become deadened and desensitised to the harsh realities of war

• In medias res - Armitage could be making a societal comment that soldiers are launched into situations they don’t fully understand

What other poems could you compare “Remains” to?

• Poppies (Memory + Effects of conflict)

• War Photographer (Guilt)

• Bayonet Charge (Reality of conflict)

"probably armed, possibly not"

• Suggests there’s a slight chance the looter the speaker killed could have been innocent and not a threat. “Probably” comes first because this is what the speaker wants to believe as it provides justification. There is clear anaphora of this phrase later in the poem, to show how he is focused on the possibility of the killing being unjustified, and how he feels guilty about it and regrets killing the looter

• It may ease his conscience to tell himself that the looter was armed and then his own life would have been at risk. In military terms this is a justification for killing, yet the event clearly disturbs the soldier

"His blood-shadow stays on the street"

• Death stains a person’s conscience and memory just as it stains the street. He is haunted by the memory - there is no way to escape it. A visual reminder of the death - foreshadows the memories that are going to haunt him

• This indicates that the killing will haunt the soldier’s future life day after day. The ‘shadow’ is not only the physical place on the ground where the man was shot, but also the imprinted memory of him that will stay in the soldier’s mind forever. He is not proud of shooting a possibly innocent civilian.

• Blood is a liquid that stains and it is very hard to get rid off. Perhaps, Armitage uses blood to represent the guilt that soldiers suffer from wars.

• In addition, you cant escape ‘shadows’ as they always stay with you no matter where you go. This suggests how the soldiers cant escape the reality no matter what they try. Alternatively, if someone is in the dark, there are no shadows, but if it is day time and there is light, then the shadows are visible. Perhaps, Armitage is provoking the fact that whenever, the soldiers try to put their past behind them and forget about it, it haunts then even more. The more they progress, the more it reminds them of their past horrors.

• as shadows are a dark colour, the shadow could be a reflection of a darker self and the way in which he feels ashamed with his actions

“Then I’m home on leave. But I blink / and he bursts again”

• Caesura and simple sentence provides a finality - going home should mean the memories are forgotten and he’ll be able to forget the terrible things he’s seen

• “blink” has connotations of waking up. The flashbacks are becoming impossible to distinguish between reality and a dream; they are merging together

• Enjambment reflects the blinking - it carries you forward but the horror is still there when the next stanza starts. Lots of plosives are used because they have a violent sound which could represent the gunfire he used to kill the looter

• The repetition of the possessive pronoun ‘I’ demonstrates the speakers guilt as he is taking responsibility for the man’s death rather than shifting the blame, showing how he truly believes that the man’s death is a result of his careless actions.

• The ending of the stanza emphasises the blink, and its significance, how little time it takes for the memory to revive. The use of enjambment carries the poem forward to the future and the ongoing flashbacks.

  Another interpretation of the construction is that ‘blink’ represents a caesura, a pause, that takes us into the future and the soldier re-living the scene; his tortured memories

“he’s here in my head when I close my eyes”

• The warzone is no longer real but in his head - internal conflict due to guilt. The speaker is battling between whether the killing was justified or not as the looter is stuck in his mind. His memory continues to haunt him. Suggests PTSD - the soldier is mentally ill. He is in a living nightmare

• The speaker is in a place of eternal restlessness; his guilt has plagued and corrupted him

• The heavy, alliterative ‘h’ sounds in ‘he’. ‘here’ and ‘head’ mirror the heavy thoughts which weigh on the speaker’s mind. It is effectively re-creating the sound of heavy breathing, a common symptom after nightmares or other difficult memories.

• It is as though he has switched positions with the looter: instead of the soldier chasing the looter to kill him, he is now trying his best to run away from him and evade the guilt

“near to the knuckle…his bloody life in my bloody hands”

• Pronoun “my” shows there’s no collective responsibility now - he feels completely responsible

• “bloody hands” is a possible reference to Macbeth (blood is used as a symbolic motif for guilt). This allusion hints that the speaker has been unbalanced by his guilt, as Lady Macbeth was (after trying to wash imaginary blood from her hands). Armitage implies that it is not natural for humans to kill others, and they can’t cope with it and shouldn’t have to

• The guilt lingers within him. The repetition of the adjective bloody shows how the speaker finds it difficult to differentiate between the looter and himself. His guilt has blurred the normal process of logic in his mind.

• An interesting suggestion is that the narrator may be close to ending his life. The idiom, ‘near to the knuckle’ suggests that he cannot cope with life, so tormented is he by the overwhelming nightmare.

• The term is both literal and metaphorical; he had the looter’s literal blood on his hands after killing him and also the guilt. This is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth where in Act 2 Scene 2 Macbeth says “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood from my hands?”. This expresses Macbeth’s guilt after his first murder. Later, it is Lady Macbeth who crumbles under the weight of guilt and suffers nightmares and compulsive hand-washing.

• The use of ‘bloody’ could show that he is almost cursing the man for the guilt and suffering he has caused him. It could be an attempt at trying to pass on the guilt to clear his conscience, by making the victim responsible for his own death.