Remains

• Who wrote Remains?

  Simon Armitage
• Simon Armitage was born in 1963
• Simon Armitage is the current poet laureate (At the time of writing in 2024)
• Remains is based on the true story of Guardsman Tromans who was a machine gunner in the Iraq War in 2003
• Remains is about the after effects of conflict , and the indescribable horror of war
• The poem begins mid action with quote "On another occasion, we get sent out" - This suggests that something has happened before, and the reader is not fully aware of the situation taking place - This helps us to understand the lack of ease the soldiers would have been at going to an uncontrolled environment - It would be chaotic and they would not have been at ease
• The poem begins mid action with quote "On another occasion, we get sent out" - This suggests that something has happened before, and the reader is not fully aware of the situation taking place - This helps us to understand the lack of ease the soldiers would have been at going to an uncontrolled environment - It would be chaotic and they would not have been at ease

  
• The repetition of "somebody else" in the first line of the second stanza may be used so that soldier can deflect the blame onto others and not just himself - This line becomes dominated by the other soldiers - This minimises his own role in the shooting , and suggests he was not the main culprit

  
• The use the word "my" in the quote "his bloody hands in my bloody life" marks a shift that focuses on solely the narrator - The poem ends with the acknowledgement that narrator is taking responsibility - He deals with the consequences alone

  
• Armitage might use enjambment in the line "Three of a kind all letting fly, and I swear" to show the life changing moment when the soldier shot the looter - The fact that the line carries over onto the next stanza causes the reader to stop - This emphasises that the soldier ruined his life at this precise moment when he shot the looter , and how he became a broken man

  
• Armitage might use sentence length to reflect the trauma of the soldier's experience - The short sentence "Then I'm home on leave." uses a caesura which causes a forced pause in the middle of this line - This gives a sense of finality to this sentence , and the narrator feels that going home will change things - But this does not happen

  
• The use of the repetition of "probably armed, possibly not" gives the poem a cyclical structure - this suggests the trauma that the soldier has experienced is inescapable

  
• The title "Remains" is defined in the dictionary as the parts left over when other parts have been used, removed or destroyed - This mirrors the soldier who was has been used in the machine of war - The soldier in the poem doesn't die, but metaphorically something inside of him does die when he shoots the looter

  
• The title "Remains" could also be literal reference to the looter , who's "blood shadow" is a physical remain that stays on the street - The looter remains in his head

  
• The language used in the line "legs it up the road" is relaxed and casual - On the one hand this suggests that the event that the soldier was involved in was an everyday event for him because this was something that they constantly did - This shows that the soldiers had become desensitized to the work that they had to carry out

  
• The poem becomes filled with horrific imagery after the soldier shoots the looter, which is evident in the quote "I see every round as it rips through his life" - This is a violent metaphor that becomes more shocking when we contrast it to the previous casual language - Armitage has juxtaposed to different types of language - Armitage has done this as it paints a stronger picture of the before and after effects of conflict on the soldier

  
• The words "sort of" in the quote "sort of inside out" is very vague language - This reflects the impossibility of describing what is actually happening - The looter has been shot and his guts have come out but the soldier does not have the vocabulary to describe it - Despite his army training, the narrator is not prepared for the harsh reality of killing somebody

  
• The treatment of the wounded looter is described with imagery that resembles the work of binmen - the use of the verb "tosses" shows a complete disrespect for the man as if he is literally a piece of rubbish - The fact that he put in the back off a lorry makes the reader picture binmen throwing bin bags off the back of a van - Armitage uses this language to show the disregard the soldiers have for human life

  
• In the poem, the soldier turns to substance abuse as a coping mechanism - the "him" is a reference to his memory of the looter that will not disappear from the soldier's mind - the word "flush" is linked to the idea of having to cleanse or get rid of something unpleasant, like a toilet - This word suggests that the soldier is unclean and sick because of the shooting

  
• Armitage uses the war metaphor "dug in behind enemy lines" to describe the memory of the looter being stuck in the soldier's head - The use of war imagery whilst the narrator is at home on leave shows the impact that war has had on him - He begins to think in a manner associated with war , and its inescapable - He cannot switch off the "soldier side" of him

  
• The use of sibilance in the quote "sun-stunned, sand-smothered land" causes the reader to stop and look closely at it - the quote uses compound adjectives , and the use of "sun" and "sand" creates a positive image - The adjoining words of "stunned" and "smothered" create a more sinister image - This reflects how there is nothing positive left for the narrator , and everything he experiences is now tainted with the evil of war

  
• The quote "my bloody hands" is a reference to Shakespeare's Macbeth - In Act 2 Scene 2 , Lady Macbeth urges Macbeth to wash the blood from his hands after killing the King - Just like in Macbeth, murder and horrific images of the murdered cannot be forgotten - They stay with the soldier causing mental damage