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Simon Armitage · Power and Conflict Anthology
AQA10 questions available at this level
by Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage (born 1963) is a contemporary English poet from Marsden, West Yorkshire. He has been UK Poet Laureate since May 2019, succeeding Carol Ann Duffy (who held the post 2009-2019). He originally trained as a probation officer, is now a professor at Leeds University, and served as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 2015 to 2019. He is known for writing in an accessible, conversational style that draws on everyday Northern English speech.
Important biographical note: Armitage never served in any military or combat role. "Remains" (2007) was written for Channel 4's documentary The Not Dead and is based on interviews with Iraq War veterans - not on personal experience. The poem draws on the testimony of a soldier (often identified as Guardsman Tromans, who served in Basra and later suffered severe PTSD); Armitage's role was to act as a poetic translator of these accounts.
The poem explores the psychological aftermath of killing in modern warfare. Unlike older war poetry that focused on trenches and patriotism, "Remains" confronts the reality that soldiers carry the trauma of combat long after they return home.
Key contextual points:
“probably armed, possibly not”
The descending certainty (from "probably" to "possibly") reveals the speaker's moral doubt. He cannot be sure the killing was justified, and this uncertainty is the seed of his later guilt and PTSD. The phrase returns in his sleep in stanza 6 (line 22), so the doubt is what haunts him.
“End of story, except not really”
The volta of the poem. The caesura creates a pause that mirrors the speaker's failed attempt to close the chapter. "Except not really" is devastatingly understated -- this one line signals the shift from narrative to psychological torment.
“blood-shadow”
A compound metaphor fusing bloodstain and shadow. The stain will not leave the street, and he walks over it on patrol for weeks (lines 18 to 19); the "shadow" suggests the man's death has left a permanent, dark imprint - both on the street and on the speaker's conscience.
“in my head”
At the start of stanza 7 (line 25), just after drink and drugs have failed to drive him out, the dead man is lodged in the speaker's head whenever he closes his eyes. The present tense makes the haunting immediate and ongoing: he has become an inescapable mental presence, and the speaker cannot find peace even in sleep.
“dug in behind enemy lines”
Extended military metaphor. The dead man has invaded the speaker's mind like a soldier entrenched in hostile territory. Ironically, the speaker's own psyche has become the battlefield -- the war has followed him home.
“his bloody life in my bloody hands”
A devastating pun: "bloody" works as a colloquial intensifier (swearing) and a literal description (blood-stained). The idiom about having blood on your hands (meaning guilt for a death) is made horrifyingly literal. The end-stopped final line is inescapable and definitive.
“legs it”
The informal, everyday language creates a sense of authenticity -- this sounds like a real soldier speaking, not a polished literary voice. It also normalises the violence, making the later horror more shocking by contrast.
[Line 17: the speaker tries to close the story with a stock phrase, then takes it back]
The speaker tries to dismiss the killing as a closed chapter using a casual, dismissive phrase. The euphemism reveals his coping mechanism -- trying to minimise the significance of taking a life. Its immediate contradiction in the same line exposes the failure of this strategy (see Key Quotes).
[Stanza 2: the word for the whole group, three times as the soldiers open fire]
Repeated emphasis on the collective action (the three of them, agreed, firing together) reveals the speaker's desperation to distribute guilt. By insisting others were equally responsible, he tries -- and fails -- to lessen his personal burden.
“tosses”
One of his mates flings the dead man's insides back where they came from (line 15). The visceral, almost unbearable detail forces the reader to confront the physical reality of violence, and the casual verb paired with such horrific content creates a jarring dissonance that reflects the soldier's desensitisation.
[Line 30: the same intensifier used twice in the last line]
The word operates on two levels simultaneously: as a common British swear word expressing frustration, and as a literal description of blood-stained hands. This dual meaning captures both the speaker's emotional anguish and physical guilt in a single devastating line (see Key Quotes).
[Stanzas 5 to 6: he blinks, and across the stanza break the looter charges out of the bank again]
Lines spill over stanza breaks, mirroring how the speaker's thoughts and memories overflow beyond his control. The fractured line structure reflects a fractured mind -- he cannot contain the memory within neat boundaries.
[Line 26: the dead man entrenched like an enemy soldier]
The dead man is described using the language of military strategy -- he has "dug in" (entrenched) in the speaker's mind (see Key Quotes). This ironic inversion shows that the war has followed the soldier home; his own psyche is now occupied territory.
[Line 27: two hyphenated adjectives for the desert land, each alliterating on s]
The repeated "s" sounds create a hissing, suffocating quality that mirrors the oppressive desert heat and the speaker's sense of being smothered by memory. The alliterative compound adjectives also slow the reader down, forcing them to dwell in the discomfort.
For the AQA exam, you must compare two poems from the anthology. These are the strongest pairings with "Remains" and the key points of comparison.
by Ted Hughes
by Carol Ann Duffy
by Beatrice Garland
Rights notice: © Simon Armitage (b. 1963), from The Not Dead (Pomona, 2008). The poem is paraphrased line by line here, not printed. Quotations from “Remains” are short fair-dealing extracts under CDPA 1988 §30 (criticism, review, quotation). For full text, students should consult the board-licensed AQA Power & Conflict anthology or Armitage’s collection.