How do I analyse Remains for GCSE?

What is Remains about?

Remains is spoken by a British soldier remembering a patrol in a war zone. He and two other soldiers were sent to deal with looters raiding a bank. One looter ran, and the soldier could not be sure whether he was carrying a weapon. All three soldiers opened fire, and the man was killed. His body was taken away, and that should have been the end of it.

It is not the end. Out on patrol, the soldier walks over the stain on the street week after week. Back home on leave, the scene replays every time he blinks or falls asleep, and drink and drugs cannot shift it. By the last lines the dead man is lodged inside his head, and the soldier feels he will carry that life with him for good.

The title has two meanings. Remains can mean a dead body, and it can mean whatever is left behind. Here, what remains is the memory, and the guilt that comes with it.

What is the context of Remains?

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in West Yorkshire and became Poet Laureate in 2019. Remains comes from The Not Dead, a set of poems he wrote for a television documentary about former soldiers living with the mental effects of war. The poems grew out of the soldiers' own accounts and were published as a collection in 2008. Remains draws on the experience of a British soldier who served in Iraq.

The speaker shows the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. It is a condition in which a person keeps reliving a frightening event, through flashbacks and nightmares, long after it is over. The poem shows that a soldier can come home carrying an injury nobody else can see.

For AO3, it helps to know that British troops fought in Iraq from 2003. Soldiers on patrol there sometimes had to decide in a split second whether someone was a threat. The poem asks what that decision does to the person who has to make it.

How does Armitage present guilt and trauma in Remains?

Armitage starts with a voice that sounds almost relaxed. "On another occasion" makes the story sound like one of many the soldier could tell, and slang such as "legs it" is how people talk to their mates. That casual tone matters. It suggests how soldiers learn to talk about violence, and it makes the breakdown later in the poem hit harder.

The doubt at the centre of the poem sits in one phrase: "probably armed, possibly not". The soldier cannot know whether the man was a threat, and that uncertainty is what he cannot live with. He mentions the other two soldiers only vaguely, as if sharing out the responsibility, but the rest of the poem shows that guilt cannot be shared out.

After the turn, the imagery grows darker. The compound word "blood-shadow", two words joined to make a new one, names the stain left on the street, and suggests something that lingers like a shadow. Later the dead man is "dug in behind enemy lines", a military metaphor that turns the soldier's own mind into a battlefield where the enemy cannot be moved.

The last line, "his bloody life in my bloody hands", sums up the poem. "Bloody" works twice: the man's life ended in blood, and the soldier feels it on his own hands, but the word is also a swear word, full of frustration. Blood on the hands is an old symbol of guilt, the same one Shakespeare uses for Lady Macbeth. The soldier was doing his job, and he still cannot put the memory down.

What do the form and structure of Remains add?

Remains is a monologue, one speaker talking as if to a listener, in everyday language. It has seven quatrains (four-line stanzas) and ends with a couplet, a stanza of two lines. There is no regular rhyme scheme or metre, which suits a man telling his story the way it comes to him. The short final stanza makes the ending feel cut off, as if there is nothing more he can say.

The poem turns at the start of the fifth stanza, with "End of story, except not really." A turning point like this is called a volta. Before it, the soldier tells us what happened. After it, the poem shows what the memory is doing to him, and it never goes back.

Armitage uses the present tense from the first line, even though the events are in the past. That is how people often tell stories aloud, and it also suggests that for this soldier the killing is still happening. Enjambment, where a sentence runs on past the end of a line, carries the memory across stanza breaks too. He says "But I blink", and the next stanza opens with the looter bursting through the bank doors again, as if the memory will not stay inside its stanza.

Which poems does Remains compare well with?

Remains pairs well with poems about memory and the lasting effects of conflict. Three strong choices are below. Choose the one you can quote most confidently from memory.

What could an exam question on Remains ask?

In AQA Paper 2, Section B prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster, and you compare it with one other poem from the cluster, chosen from memory. The question is worth 30 marks, assessed on AO1, AO2 and AO3. There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Remains could be the printed poem, or the second poem you bring in yourself. Two focuses to practise:

Focus 1: Compare how poets present the effects of conflict on the mind in Remains and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Focus 2: Compare how poets present guilt in Remains and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing Remains with War Photographer:

Both poets present memories of war that refuse to stay in the past. Armitage's soldier opens casually, "On another occasion", as if telling one anecdote among many, but after the volta "End of story, except not really" the killing replays whenever he blinks. Duffy's photographer also relives a death, when a stranger's face appears in the developing tray like "a half-formed ghost". Both men are haunted, yet Armitage's speaker fired the shots himself, so his memory carries guilt as well as grief.

Key quotations from Remains to learn

Six short quotations, each with a line of analysis to learn alongside it.

• "On another occasion": the casual opening makes the killing sound like one story among many, which makes the later breakdown more shocking.
• "probably armed, possibly not": the doubt at the heart of his guilt. He can never know if the man was a threat, and the same doubt comes back to haunt his sleep.
• "End of story, except not really": the volta, where the poem turns from what happened to what it has done to him.
• "blood-shadow": a compound word for the stain on the street. It stays there, and he has to walk over it week after week.
• "dug in behind enemy lines": a military metaphor. The dead man is like an enemy soldier dug into a trench inside the speaker's mind.
• "his bloody life in my bloody hands": the final line. "Bloody" is both literal and a swear word, and blood on the hands is an old image of guilt.