Remains By Simon Armitage

Remains is a poem, written in first person, about a soldier is haunted by the memory of a violent past. He writes about the experience of shooting a looter who was “raiding a bank”. Later the soldier thinks about the shooting every time he walks down the street. Then again, when he returns home he is still haunted by the thought of what he has done. He tries drink and drugs to drown out the memory, but they do not work. The line ‘he’s here in my head when I close my eyes’ indicates this. The theme of guilt stands out the most in the poem as he repeats the line “probably armed possibly not” throughout the poem. This shows us that the solider didn’t manage to see whether they were a danger or not, he was just trained to shoot him, “…are all of the same mind, so all three of us open fire” shows us this. Later on in the poem, the soldier is remembering his dreams he’s having, Armitage writes “… and he bursts again through the doors of the bank. Sleep, and he’s probably armed, possibly not”. The use of “again” at the start of the stanza shows us that the solider has had recurring dreams about his actions. The poem also shows sympathy for the looter, in the same stanza, the line “dream, and he’s torn apart by a dozen rounds” shows us that the soldier didn’t feel that the man should have died in such a violent way, when the soldiers didn’t even check to see if he was armed. The theme of guilt and sympathy tie well together in this poem because the solider is guilty for what he has done and also has sympathy for the way they treated the criminal.Armitage also almost slates the army in the poem by interpreting the soldiers as nameless and identically trained with the use of “somebody else and somebody else” when referring the men who are doing the shooting with him. The lack of names suggests that it doesn’t really matter that much in the army, just as long as you can kill in the same way as others and that they could have been any men. The line “are all of the same mind” shows that they are all taught to treat the looter in the same way, to just automatically open fire at him. Armitage also repeated refers to the lack of respect the soldiers show the criminal with phrases like, “tosses his guts back into his body. Then he’s carted off in the back of a lorry”. The use of the verb “tosses” shows us that the soldier has no emotion when it comes to criminals, this could be what Armitage is saying what the army does to you, train you so you have no care for people that have committed an illegal act and teat their life as worthless. Maybe that is what the army thinks makes you a reliable soldier.

Lorna Havill