GCSE English Literature: Poetry Anthology - Power & Conflict (Remains - Entire Poem Version)

Stanza 1:

• In media res: highlights mundane/commonplace tone of murder

• 'On another occasion': colloquial/mundane tone at the time & surprise to audience

• No longer normal & special to him (this is why he keeps recalling it)

• 'legs it': childish tone & lack of care if victim is innocent/harmless

• 'probably armed, possibly not': alliteration & parallelism & motif 'wishful thinking, conclusion' (as 'mate' isn't seen picking up weapon)

Stanza 2 (+ context):

• 'somebody else': reluctance to name = acceptance of atrocity

• 'Three of a kind': alludes to Three Musketeers (who fought for justice) & inverted as these soldiers commit murder

• 'letting fly': like a movie/video game & unreal - euphemism of murder

• 'I swear': confession of guilt (alludes to the Bible in courts of law) & contrast from 'we' 'us' reinforces personal suffering

Stanza 3 (+ context):

• Italics - serious tone & no longer hides deep consequences

• 'I see': allow speaker to dull sounds & smells; however visual 'image' remains

• 'rips through his life' (Volta): callous tone & 'through' suggesting familial repercussions (and/or bullets have gone through his body so 'daylight' can be seen on the other side)

• 'on the other side': alludes to death & ironic as speaker feels that he's completely destroyed his only life (& doesn't feel that he's gone to heaven)

• 'sort of inside out': incomprehensible & accentuates haunting image

Stanza 4:

• 'agony' 'goes by' 'body' 'lorry': half-rhymes = unsettling/incomplete & underscores mind's fractured state

• 'pain itself, the image of agony': 'drinks' & 'drugs' allow speaker to dull sounds & smells; however visual 'image' remains

• 'my mates': contrast from distancing

• 'tosses his guts back into his body': callous tone & 'mate' might normalise this (or reinforces universal grief)

• 'he's carted off in the back of a lorry': reference to Wilfred Owen's attack on foreign war & England's glamorisation of war & inevitable fate of traumatised soldiers

Stanza 5:

• 'End of story': desperate tone & moral of 'story' is the inevitable, immoral callousness & moral destruction of all soldiers (as a result of war)

• 'blood-shadow': ironic inversion of 'shadow' that follows the body & how speaker's guilt follows him like a 'shadow'

Stanza 6 (+ context):

• 'Sleep' 'Dream': reference to Macbeth's inability to sleep/dream as a result of guilt & reference to Hamlet's 'death = chance to sleep/dream' & suggests suicidal tendencies to avoid nightmare-like memories

• 'he's torn part by a dozen rounds': violent verb underscores horrific tone

• 'Dozen': alludes to 'The Dirty Dozen' war film where immoral criminals are sent to war; Armitage inverts this via moral soldier descending to savagery (as a result of war)

• 'the drink and the drugs won't flush him out': juxtaposition of past-self to faeces/excrement & highlights tone of disgust

Stanza 7:

'dug in behind enemy lines': his mind is at war with deceased victim

• 'some distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land': sibilance gives force to beautiful/peaceful tone & unreal & contrast with poetic description of 'murdered' land (smothered = murder via suffocation)

• 'or six-feet-under in desert sand': reference to death

Stanza 8 (+ context):

• 'bloody life' 'bloody hands': repetition of colloquial tone emphasises desire to remove memory (which fails) & - Reference to Macbeth: 'a little water clears us of this deed' & accentuates concealed guilt/suicidal thoughts

• Suicide of society: murder of foreign soldiers = pretending to help the country & weakening of humanity

• 'hands' rhyming with 'sands': completeness/responsibility of guilt = war's capacity to ruin soldiers' morality