Remains by Simon Armitage

Title “Remains” of a dead body, lingering

On another occasion, we got sent out
“another” - flippant, not rare/uncommon; “we” - first person perspective of soldier = forces reader to step into shoes of speaker + comprehend thought process; psychological suffering elicits sympathy
to tackle looters raiding a bank.
And one of them legs it up the road,
probably armed, possibly not.
plosive sounds; potential threat - no time to think in the moment, future paranoia; two minds, conflicting thoughts, uncertainty

Well myself and somebody else and somebody else
polysyndeton; “myself” - first person reflexive pronoun first, narrator taking lion share of guilt, feeling most responsibility; still easing his own conscience with “somebody else”, alleviating guilt; anonymity suggests either protecting them or not remembering their names
are all of the same mind,
so all three of us open fire.
semantic field of unification; repetition of “all” reinforces this concept
Three of a kind all letting fly, and I swear

I see every round as it rips through his life –
“see” - present tense, reliving, replaying in his mind; “rips” - visceral, brutal + violent verb, dehumanised, chremamorphism = bullets ‘ripped’ through him, likening him to a fragile piece of paper torn to shreds
I see broad daylight on the other side.
tunnel-vision; seeing through him; indelible memory; “daylight” could refer to heaven
So we’ve hit this looter a dozen times
quicken in tone and pace; excessive violence - inured, desensitised to violence, hardened, lost humanity
and he’s there on the ground, sort of inside out,
colloquial phrase - casual violence; part and parcel of a soldier’s life

pain itself, the image of agony.
One of my mates goes by
and tosses his guts back into his body.
no care and consideration; chremamorphism; ‘tosses’ like a bin bag; mirrors internal conflict; gruesome - pushing organs, innards spilling out back in
Then he’s carted off in the back of a lorry.
little value

End of story, except not really.
‘End’ - drawing line under incident
His blood-shadow stays on the street, and out on patrol
stains = representation of guilt and visual reminder of what persona did, sparks of memories
I walk right over it week after week.
enjambment and lack of rhyme - more natural
Then I’m home on leave. But I blink
caesura - conclusive; ‘But’ - abrupt conjunction; plosive alliteration

and he bursts again through the doors of the bank.
no escape; replaying scene on loop in his mind
Sleep, and he’s probably armed, and possibly not.
connotations of a rehearsed phrase; repetition: distressing him most
Dream, and he’s torn apart by a dozen rounds.
repetition of ‘dozen’ from sequence of events before
And the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out –
dental alliteration; blunt out psychological pain; personal; overall, direct and substantial tone; perhaps, more robust mental health support available after persona left army, but not sufficient enough

he’s here in my head when I close my eyes,
aspirant alliteration of breathy ‘h’ sound; panic attack; nightmares, flashbacks, PTSD
dug in behind enemy lines,
looter managed to take territory of mind; difficult to remove from captured land - remains there
not left for dead in some distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land
bitterness, aggression, hissing in sibilance and lingering effect; imagery
or six-feet-under in desert sand,

but near to the knuckle, here and now,
‘knuckle’ - allusion to pulling the trigger'; physically too rather than only mentally, emotionally, psychologically; informal tone, contrasting with previous descriptive imagery
his bloody life in my bloody hands.
allusion to Macbeth - ‘bloody hands’; repetition of ‘bloody’ - mild swear word; PTSD, trauma; no finality - does not follow rest of four-line stanza poem, instead stops short at two lines.

CONTEXT:

Repetitive, cyclical feeling - caught in endless cycle, rumination of what if.

Armitage’s poem featured in 2007 Channel 4' documentary film The Not Dead. Dramatic monologue written in the voice of real-life Guardsman Tromans, who fought in Iraq War in 2003 and suffered from PTSD. Armitage views confessing feelings of vulnerability as a supreme act of bravery and met many soldiers who has had traumatic experiences during battle.