AQA Power and Conflict: 'Tissue'

'Tissue' comes from Imtiaz Dharker's volume The Terrorist at my Table, and like many of the poems in that collection, it deals with issues of perception and bias, focused on how we use language. In this instance, Dharker seems focused especially on ideas of naming and explores the different resonances of the word 'tissue' so as to explore a wide range of ideas through a series of extended images that build up throughout the poem. Dharker’s wider poetic themes are often concerned with transparency, with barriers to understanding, with how we may ‘see through’ things or see them differently from a different perspective. The image of ‘tissue’ is a powerful one for her, uniting as it does the idea of flesh and the idea of paper, and focusing on how light has a transformative effect. 

The first sense of the word ‘tissue’ in the dictionary, or if you look it up online—certainly the first sense that pops up in a Google search—is now usually the biological sense—meaning the material with which living things are made. However, in an etymologically based dictionary, you will tend to see first the oldest sense of the word, meaning fabric, and this will be related to its origin in Old French ‘tissu’ (woven) ultimately coming from Latin ‘textere’ meaning to weave. This is the same origin as our modern word ‘text’, something of which it is unlikely Dharker is unaware. In one sense, then, we are immediately talking about text as soon as the word ‘tissue’ is mentioned. The third sense of the word is that of paper, specifically a thin, fine paper used often for wrapping or packing.

  

The poem is written in quatrains of roughly equal length—mostly iambic, though not consistently. There us no rhyme-scheme, though some assonance and alliteration seems to hold the verse together to some extent. Generally, though it is a conversational, informal style of poem, characterized by enjambment as it imitates the musings of a speaker, softening and blurring the lineation.  The direct address throughout ‘you’, ‘your’ helps to create this sense of an intimate poetic conversation.

As with any word, the immediate sense of the word in the title for any reader will depend on the context. In a laboratory or operating theatre, it would be biological. If you were at a costume designer’s, perhaps you would expect it to refer to glittering material. In a gift shop it would refer to wrapping paper. The title gives no clues as to which meaning we should prioritise, but Dharker immediately captures and defines the title’s meaning in her first word of the poem, removing any initial ambiguity and tying it down to ‘paper’, specifically transparent paper ‘that lets the light / shine through’.

This first sense of the word ‘tissue’, fragile paper, is then explored, as Dharker discusses how it might be paper that is ‘thinned by age or touching’ (so not manufactured tissue paper). This leads on to a discussion of old paper, ‘well-used’ and the way in which this kind of thin paper might be found in texts such as the Koran. Dharker links this powerful cultural reference with the idea of family—names, she suggests, may be written in the back of the Koran as they would be in the front of a family Bible in the West, so as to record the history of a family, giving birth and death dates for its members. The ‘tissue’ of pages and of bodies ‘the height and weight’ is here linked in a single image—and of course may further link with the original material used for old manuscript book pages, which was vellum, or calfskin—both tissue in a literal sense of skin, and tissue-like in its thinness and transparency.

In stanza four, Dharker introduces a playful idea: ‘if buildings were paper, I might /feel their drift’. The idea of paper buildings inspires wordplay, as she punningly describes how she could ‘feel their drift’. The idea of a building made of paper seems at first paradoxical, as it seems to act against the idea of strength; Dharker seems here to be suggesting that there is strength to be found in fragility. In Japan, building partitions are made of paper, and she may be thinking of this deliberate fragility in the face of earthquakes—she describes ‘how easily /they fall away’. In fact, paper houses are less easy to destroy, because of their flexibility in the face of an earthquake.

The poem then moves rapidly on to consider ‘Maps too’. Maps are ways of finding out not only about places, but about the people who made them. The image of seems to suggest that the transparency of paper makes the maps appear three-dimensional—the marks on the paper like the real erosion ‘that rivers make’—and that this is literally illuminating, as ‘the sun shines through / their borderlines’.  Light here is seen as something that is truth-bringing. Dharker seems here to be thinking about how the human uses of paper can inform us about human nature. Even details such as grocery bills, she suggests, can tell us a lot about each other. Receipts, representing what is bought and sold, are transformed into ‘paper kites’, something which suggests liberation and childish play, but which is also another echo of eastern culture (one thinks of the fighting kites in The Kite Runner).

The image is developed with the thought of how the multiple pieces of paper used by a person could be transformed: ‘an architect could use all this’. The image is almost of a papier mache house, with strips of paper layered over and over each other to create a firm fabric for building. The way in which light can come through paper, it is suggested, would give an additional beauty to the building, ‘to trace a grand design’. An architect building in this way, it is suggested, would never want to use traditional materials again. This final image essentially suggests that the buildings are made up of experiences ‘layer over layer’.

The building described in the final stanzas becomes therefore a metaphorical building of experience, a ‘grand design’ which is touchable, strokeable, ‘never made to last’, allowing light to shine through it. At the conclusion of the poem it becomes clear that this building is built out of ‘living tissue’—that the paper ‘tissue’ that represents human experience, history and knowledge is here combined with human touch and affection for the ‘tissue’ of skin. The final line stands alone ‘turned into your skin’, again directly, almost abruptly addressing the readers and drawing them into the poem. In effect the metaphor enlarges to suggest a person created out of the experience and knowledge of the past. It is possible that Dharker is thinking here about the traditional image of God as an architect, designing the world and its people (as in Blake's famous image). The idea of a greater power creating humanity through layers of experience and emotion seems to echo these ideas.

AQA Power and Conflict: 'War Photographer'

'War Photographer' is from Carol Ann Duffy's striking first collection of poetry Standing Female Nude (Anvil, 1985). It is a piece which, like may of Duffy's poems, seeks to look below the surface of a situation, and examine the feelings hidden beneath the faces that people present to the world. It also, like many poems in the collection (including the title piece), is about the interaction of people with art, and what art represents. You may see a text of the poem here.

Although Duffy is famous for her use of the dramatic monologue, this poem, which could so easily have been written as a monologue, instead is written in the third person, which gives it some distance--arguably, the same distance of which the poem speaks between creator and observer. However, it uses an omniscient tone which apparently allows us to see into the photographer's thoughts and feelings.

Street execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner, Saigon, 1968

The poem explores the idea of how a war photographer, a bystander to atrocity, yet manages to take pictures without being devastated by what he does. The origins of the poem apparently lie in Duffy's friendship with the photographers Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, and in their discussion with her about their work (there's an interesting interview with McCullin here which gives a sense of what he went through). In an interview, Carol Ann Duffy said how interested she was in the idea of a war photographer as opposed to the photos he might take: ‘in the dilemma of someone who has that as a job... to go to these places and come back with the images.'

War photography has long posed a moral dilemma. There are some shocking photographs of war atrocities which seem to demand of the reader 'how could someone record this and not intervene?' Of course, most of the time the answer is evident. One would not intervene in an execution in a hostile country, for instance, for fear of being executed oneself. Yet to film that execution still seems to make the photographer complicit with what is done. In the online comments for the interview with McCullin above, one commentator says about the 81-year old McCullin, apparently without irony 'I tend to think the honourable way out for a war photographer is to die on the front line. Otherwise it is ghastly exploitation'. 

The poem describes the photographer carrying out his work, developing photographs, and remembering what happened in each case. The narrative suggests that the photographer feels that what he does is in some senses a sacred duty—something that must be done, although he finds it personally painful. His role in recording the images of war is a task that he feels ‘someone must’ do in order to publicise the atrocities being committed.

The poem is written in sestets of roughly equal length—mostly iambic, and many lines in pentameter, though not consistently. The regular rhyme-scheme, ABBCDD, avoids resolution with the A and C rhymes left unmatched, —something that seems to echo the war photographer’s own sense of turmoil, even as the sestets suggest how he seeks to impose calm on this feeling. The unpartnered end-words , however, often find internal echoes if not end-rhyme. For instance the assonantal rhyme between ‘alone’ and ‘intone’ or ‘tears’ and ‘beers’ further help to bind the poem together. The use of enjambement helps to create a conversational tone, which de-emphasises the rhymes as well, making the couplet rhymes subtly emphatic.

In the first stanza, we are presented with the picture of the photographer in his darkroom, ‘finally alone’, with the emphasis on ‘finally’ suggesting that for him this is a place of refuge from other people. The space is implicitly calm, as rolls of film become metonymic ‘spools of suffering’, the alliteration emphasising the contrast between the controlled ‘order’ which arranges them, and the agony which engendered them. The language of the poem suggests a semantic field of religion, with the photographer’s ritual of developing film (this is of course set in a pre-digital age) compared to the ritual of a priest saying Mass. 

In a dark-room, in order to protect light-sensitive film as it is developed, the only light which can be used is red light. Duffy was raised as a Catholic, and in a Catholic Church, a red light by the altar indicates the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle—the body of Christ. This is significant, as it suggests that the work that the photographer does, in revealing suffering to people in order to create compassion (‘passion’ itself means suffering of course) is analogous to the role of the priest in revealing Christ to people. The extended simile which compares him to a priest suggests the seriousness of his work, and echoes of the Bible emphasise this impression. The quotation from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah ‘All flesh is grass’ is often used as a commonplace to indicate that all are subject to death. Here, it suggests the universality of the experiences that the photographer has had in the different locations named, its passive acceptance at odds with the horror of the conflicts. 

The three sites which Duffy names here were all locations of significant conflict when she wrote the poem--and all, interestingly, examples of civil conflict, where the people concerned were in dispute with others of their own country. In Belfast, the ongoing violent civil war between republicans and loyalists was known as The Troubles. You can find out more about it in detail here on the BBC website.  In Beirut, the Siege of Beirut had started in 1982, when Israeli troops invaded Lebanon to attack the PLO. Between 15,000-20,000 people are estimated to have been killed, mainly civilians. Phnom Penh probably refers to the Cambodian Genocide which took place between 1975-9. In all these locations, the war photographer would have seen horrific injustice and cruelty.

The short, almost clipped sentences (‘he has a job to do’, ‘something is happening’) suggest the photographer has only a brittle control over his emotions. In the second stanza the process of developing film by putting the paper of the photographs into trays of developing and fixing solution is described. The use of the word 'solutions' here is ironic--the developing of the photographs is in one sense a 'solution' for the imperative 'he has a job to do'. The solutions are also the dissolved chemicals in liquids he uses to achieve this. His hands tremble as he develops the photographs--perhaps in anticipation of what he will see.  

The contrast between 'Rural England' and the locations at which he has taken the photographs is powerful, with the image of exploding fields maiming children perhaps recalling one of the most famous war photographs of all time--that taken by Nick Ut of the nine-year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from a napalm attack which had burned off her clothes. This kind of agony is contrasted with the 'ordinary pain' which, it is implied, a sunny day can cheer. The distance between the experience of England and the war zones which he covers is vast, and is in some ways a recreation of one of the most famous war poems of all time, Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’.

In Brooke's sonnet, which opens 'If I should die, think only this of me', he describes how he may, as a soldier, one day lie dead in a 'foreign field' which he will somehow make 'forever' English through his presence. He imagines an ‘English heaven’ whose imperialist expectations are opposed to the ‘foreign dust’ with which he will mingle. A similar opposition here suggests that those in ‘rural England’ drinking beer (rather than Brooke's tea) are equally detached from the realities of war, and do not realise the visceral horror of 'how the blood stained into foreign dust'. However, instead of being reassured that this world of peace exists, the protagonist  of 'War Photographer' seems increasingly disturbed by the disjunction between his work and the 'home' to which he returns. 

The poem takes us through the stages of the photograph developing, with the features of this man appearing slowly in stanza three through the developing solution like ‘a half-formed ghost’. The simile becomes real as the man is also a ghost in the sense that he is dead and yet his death is still haunting the photographer, his features 'twisted' in remembered agony as well as in the process of development. The photographer's need for 'approval' from the man's wife to film him plays on the sense of the use of the word 'approval' for consent--it is the same word as the one used for when pictures are selected by an editor of a newspaper. The use of  'foreign dust' is powerfully ironic in its reference to Brooke, as the photographer seeks to create a universal world of shared feeling, pleading 'without words' (perhaps referencing the language barrier and/or the impossibility of speaking to someone in such pain) for permission to film a dying man. 

Throughout the poem, phrases such as 'he has a job to do', 'to do what someone must' show how the photographer feels his work to be a duty. Nonetheless, his feelings about his employment are complex. He knows that although his photos are significant, that they may not always be treated as significant. The editor will select only some out of hundreds, and so cannot hope to tell the full story of the experience. The photos chosen will be part of the 'supplement' of the newspaper (the sunday colour supplement magazine) but not actually front page news--this choice implies that they are not being taken as seriously as the photographer would like. Ultimately, the photographs may have an effect on the readers of the papers, but only as part of their Sunday morning routines; there is little certainty about how profound or lasting this impact will be as they move on to their ‘pre-lunch beers’. The sight of the photographs may move the paper's readers, but it will  not change their lives, or disturb them.

As the poem proceeds, the photographer seems to come to a sense of heightened clarity about his role—even as the readers see his pictures, he will be heading off to take more—and his ’impassive’ stare from the aircraft towards the war zone seems to both mimic and criticize the detachment of the English public towards his pictures. The poem ends finally with a sense that ‘they do not care’; that nothing, no matter how horrific, is sufficient to disturb the comfort of the quiet ‘rural England’ to which he has returned.

Special request: Siegfried Sassoon's 'In Me Past, Present, Future Meet'

A brief break from the AQA anthology to investigate another war poem that a reader of the blog has asked me to look at. It's not one that often appears in the anthologies, and you can see why; it's opaque on first reading, and intensely symbolic, working through a series of complex metaphors to put across its ideas.It also doesn't, at first, seem to be much about the war. You can see the full text here.

The poem is intensely introspective, contemplating the speaker's state of mind. The speaker may be the poet, of course--and people are often eager to attribute this poem as an autobiographical revelation by Sassoon--but it is worth being careful about assuming that a first person speaking voice represents the poet, when it may equally be a representation of a particular state of mind.

With this caveat, let's look at the poem. It consists of two six-line stanzas, rhymed ABBABA CDCDEE in an eight-syllable line. It has something of the feeling of a sonnet in its brevity and concision, but of course is two lines short, and is also in iambic tetrameter rather than iambic pentameter. Nonetheless the air of a sonnet remains, in the complex interlaced rhyme structure and the concluding couplet. The second stanza could easily be the sestet of a Shakespearean sonnet, and the first stanza only needs two more lines rhymed AB to give is a perfect ABBAABBA octet. It is also a poem which asks a question or raises a problem, which we perhaps expect to have resolved in the couplet at the end, as it is so often resolved in the Shakespearean sonnet.

Given Sassoon's facility with verse, the near-sonnet is clearly a deliberate choice of form, which sets up certain expectations in the reader, and unbalances them slightly. The shorter lines make it appear concise and no-nonsense, and tend to reinforce the assertive statements made. Compare, for instance, Sassoon's original lines:

In me, past, present, future meet
to hold long, chiding conference.
My lusts usurp the present tense
And strangle Reason in his seat.

with my own version in iambic pentameter below. I have kept the rhyme and the meaning, but see how the longer line makes a huge difference to the tone of the poem:

In me, past present, future now do meet
To hold a long and chiding conference.
My lusts, I find, usurp the present tense
And surely strangle reason in his seat.

So Sassoon's choice of tetrameter adds real speed and pace to the lines, creating an almost breathless effect of urgency and passion.

Statesmen at the Versailles conference

Personification is a key technique in the poem. Past, present and future seem like people, able to meet and take action. Likewise Lust, reason and love are as vital in action as the imagined 'cave-man' or 'seer'. The speaker sees himself as like a battleground, or perhaps like a war between different and opposed concerns (one wonders if the speaker is indeed War personified). The past, the present and the future meet in the speaker, like politicians negotiating a peace-plan--though it is a 'chiding' conference, with people telling each other off, so not very peaceful. The image does not suggest that the past, present and future will easily come to terms.

Of course, this central opening image is a truth. In any human being past, present and future meet, as we bring our memories of the past and our hopes for the future to deal with our lived experience in the present. However, in this situation, the elements of personality do not behave themselves. they do not submit to the 'chiding' conference designed to resolve the speaker's internal feelings of conflict, but 'usurp' the present and transgress the boundaries that the future sets. In  other words, the speaker's lived experience--his past--that he brings to the 'conference' overwhelm him. His desires are so powerful that they invade the present--not only the present time, but the 'present tense'--that is the moment that he is speaking,  so that 'I loved' becomes 'I love' or 'I kissed' becomes 'I kiss'. Of course the poem itself enacts this, being cast in the present tense throughout.


The poet clearly feels intellectually that his desires should be suppressed--they offend against reason--but they are so strong that they overwhelm and kill reason ('strangling' in particular suggests that they stop reason from speaking). Reason is here seen as like a monarch enthroned (and of course the phrase 'the seat of reason' is a commonplace) whose authority is usurped by the rebellious desires of the speaker. Interestingly in the ancient world the heart was seen as the seat of reason (Aristotle thought of it as the seat of intelligence), whereas in the modern world this is generally thought of as the brain. As though liberated by the violence done to reason, 'lusts' transform into 'loves' which leap through the imagined restrictions of the future 'to dance', liberated, 'dream-enfranchised'--that is made free in a dream.

In the second stanza, the conflict within the speaker's mind is made even more explicit, with a series of contrasts between the 'cave-man' and the 'seer', Apollo and Abraham, and the tiger and the rose. These revelations are apparently enough to make the reader 'tremble' with self-knowledge.

The series of oppositions created is interesting. The cave-man seems to be an image of unabashed masculinity--brutal, physical, aggressive--that is certainly how cave-men would be seen at the time of writing (see the copy of a 1909 image of a caveman). It is reminiscent of the kind of image portrayed of the Germans on posters such as 'Destroy this mad Brute'. However, here the cave-man is not violent, but tenderly 'clasps' the seer, the prophet. The violent side of the speaker's nature, in other words, embraces the more mystical side.

The contrast between Apollo and Abraham is more complex. Garlanded Apollo is singing, as befits his status of the God of music and poetry. However, his singing falls literally upon deaf ears, as Abraham, the Old Testament prophet who represents the Judaeo-Christian moral code, perhaps, will not hear him.

The image is reminiscent of Wilfred Owen's great poem 'The Parable of the Old Man and the Young' which re-tells the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, placing young men at war in the place of Isaac and politicians in the role of Abraham. In the original Old Testament story, Abraham is
told to sacrifice his son by God, and obeys, taking Isaac up a hill and building a pyre on which to sacrifice him. As he is about to cut his child's throat, he is prevented by the Angel of God, who tells him that he has pleased God by his obedience, and he is told to sacrifice a Ram who is caught by its horns in a thicket nearby. The story is a way of explaining why the Jewish people distinguished themselves from those peoples living around them who practised child sacrifice, and is also widely used in Christian theology as an analogy to Christ's sacrifice on the cross. In Owen's version, Abraham will not listen to the angel of God who tells him to spare his child and  'sacrifice the Ram of Pride instead'. Instead, it concludes, 'the old man would not so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one'. This horrific image may well lie behind Sassoon's idea of Abraham. In other words, Apollo's message of joy falls on deaf ears and poetry wastes its time trying to change the mind of people who think in this way. However, of course, it is not as simple as being able to say that Sassoon dislikes Judaeo-Christian religious thinking and wants to be a carefree poet, for both characters are described as 'in me'--in other words Sassoon himself is not only the poet and the seer, he is also the caveman and the Old Testament, punitive prophet.

Sassoon with Stephen Tennant (left)

At this point, it is tempting to think that the conflict that is evident in the poem is about the conflicts in Sassoon's own life. He certainly was conflicted in his attitude towards the war, known as 'Mad Jack' for his self-destructive heroism, but writing a public anti-war statement which risked imprisonment and court-martial for treason. He was also conflicted in his sexuality. Sassoon lived at a time when homosexuality was illegal, but its nonetheless thought to have had several fairly well-documented affairs with men, and was certainly at different times tormented with the ways in which his sexuality was denied free expression through the prevailing mores of his time. Perhaps this is what the poem indicates through the strongly contrasting images that run throughout it. The idea of 'lusts' overcoming rationality, and dreaming of a future when his loves would be free to express themselves in liberty would certainly mesh well with this reading. The final metaphor, 'in me the tiger sniffs the rose' is one which gently and humorously indicates how his powerful masculinity is drawn to sensuousness and delicacy. The use of the word 'sniffs' suggests a hesitancy or experimentation, and also a subtlety in the 'tiger' nature he describes.

The poem is strikingly reminiscent of the poem 'Peace' found in Sassoon's diary on 2nd April 1916:

In my heart there's cruel war that must be waged
In darkness vile with moans and bleeding bodies maimed;
A gnawing hunger drives me, wild to be assuaged,
And bitter lust chuckles within me unashamed.

This imagery of conflict and desire, the personification and wildness seem to mirror 'In Me'. However, 'Peace' is significantly more negative. If you compare the two poems, 'In Me' seems by contrast to be calm and resolved. The final lines in particular invite the reader to realise that the experience Sassoon describes is a universal experience. No-one is without conflict, no-one is without these 'elements' of humanity. If the reader is made fearful by the self-knowledge of this, then this is part of the human condition.

Adrian Caesar's Taking it Like a Man is an interesting examination of this aspect of Sassoon's experience, and he goes through in detail some of the ways in which the conflict is shown in his other poems. He also uses evidence from Sassoon's diaries to explain how Sassoon regarded his own sexuality. He speaks of a 'spiritual sickness' and says that he is 'self-poisoned' and 'self-imprisoned'. What is interesting is that in 'In Me', this kind of negative language is not present. There is certainly negativity in the 'chiding conference' and violence in 'strangle' but in general the images are positive ones: 'leap', 'dance', 'clasps' 'chanting' all imply  energy and activity but not poison or imprisonment. The openness suggested by the embrace of 'clasps' and the exploratory 'sniff' of the tiger suggests that Sassoon at this point in his life was able to admit the conflicts that he felt, but also feel that they were not destructive--but simply part of the 'elements' that made up being a man.

AQA Power and Conflict: 'Poppies'

This poem discusses the effects of war upon those who are left behind, and the impact of waiting--and grieving--particularly on women. It was written by Jane Weir at the request of Carol Ann Duffy, the poet Laureate, to commemorate those lost in war, and came out of her reading in the writing of women from the First and Second World Wars. As she says in an interview where she discusses the genesis of the poem., the language in the poem reflects her work as a textile designer, and in many ways this poem is one which deliberately creates a gulf between the 'domestic' world of the woman speaker and her son's more 'masculine' world of war.

The title, 'Poppies' immediately summons up one of the most potent symbols of warfare in the twentieth century--the poppies worn on Remembrance Day as a symbol of the fallen. As a brutal fact, poppies grow most readily on freshly turned earth (thus they grow in wheatfields, where the earth is ploughed each year) and they grew profusely on the graves of men who died in Flanders and were buried near the battlefields there in World War 1. Behind this poem lie many others with a similar theme, most particularly the poem 'In Flanders Fields' by John McCrae, which is credited with first associating the idea of poppies with the fallen, and ultimately for starting the Royal British Legion Campaign, through the work of Moina Belle Michael.

In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker describes saying farewell to her son three days before

'Armistice Sunday'. She places a poppy on his lapel before he leaves the house, and this turns his departure implicitly into a leave-taking before he goes to war, though this may simply be an extended metaphor as he is wearing a blazer, more normally associated with school uniform than army uniform. This initial confusing image is part of a confusion sustained throughout the poem--is the speaker mourning the death of her child, or simply her fears for him? Has he gone to war, or is he simply leaving home for the first time? There is little explicit indication of which reading is correct--the focus is on the mother's sadness at parting, and her hopes and fears for her child. This may come out of Weir's own sensitivity to the suffering of women who have lost children to war--it is as though she is unwilling to claim, even through a poem, that she has genuinely shared in the suffering and bereavement of which she writes. The best that she can do is to imagine it as vividly as possible.

The poem is precisely placed 'Three days before Armistice Sunday'. Armistice Sunday is actually something of a misnomer, conflating 'Remembrance Sunday' and 'Armistice Day'. The Armistice was the formal ending of World War 1, on the 'eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour', and in 1919 the date of November 11th was declared an official day of commemmoration as a result. As time went on, this was replacd, for practical purposes, with the use of the Sunday nearest to November 11th, which became known as 'Remembrance Sunday'. The omission of the word 'Remembrance' and its replacement with the more formal term 'Armistice' calls up the omitted word to the reader's mind, in a form of litotes, the rhetorical figure where you describe something through its opposite or its omission (as in 'he's not all bad'). This also makes the placing of the poem in time more uncertain; three days before Armistice Day would be the 8th November; three days before Remembrance Sunday could be within several days of this.

The form of the poem is fairly loose. Lines are not regular or metrical, but seem to be about ten syllables long, varying from 13 to 7, with the majority 9 or 11. There are often strong caesuras in the middle of lines, emphasising this sense that it is prosaic, and conversational, and also emphasising the enjambement as sentences move between lines. The speaker addresses the reader directly, using 'you', but it is clear that this is also an address to her son, and references to him occur throughout the poem to establish the relationship.

There are a series of possessive phrases which knit together the second person possessive pronoun 'your' to particularise it and make it the speaker's son:: 'your lapel', 'your blazer', 'your shirt's', 'your nose', 'your hair', your bedroom', 'your playground voice'. These references also make 'you' into an everyman figure--in some ways this could be anyone's son, something that the poet refers to when she speaks of the warm reception this poem has had from the mothers of fallen soldiers. They are also opposed and matched by a similar number of references to the first person possessive pronoun: 'my hand', 'my nose', 'my fingers', 'my words', 'my stomach', which similarly both particularises the speaker and makes her into a symbol of mothers everywhere.

I

n the second section of the poem, the detail of the farewell is lovingly dwelt upon. The speaker recouns how she took bits of cat hair off her son's jacket by rolling sellotape round her hand to create a sticky surface to which they would adhere--a very trivial domestic gesture designed to summon up the everyday (and the modern). She neatens his shirt collar, a maternal gesture, and resists her face softening' (presumably because she wants to be 'brave' and not show strong emotion). There is a sense that she feels this might embarrass her son--she wants to make a tender gesture, something from childhood, but rubbing her nose across his in an 'eskimo kiss' is 'resisted' just as she resists the desire to run her fingers through his hair. That the hair is described as 'gelled blackthorns' both suggests that he is a teenager, and implies that he is prickly and would not welcome the gesture. It might also suggest that he is not yet in the army, as the army has strict regulations about hair, and gelled spikes would be frowned upon. 

The mother feels that there are words that she would like to say, but they are 'flattened, rolled, turned into felt'. Here there is a pun between the feelings which are felt and the name of the compressed material that she describes, 'felt'. Her feelings have been turned into the past tense, they have been 'felt', they cannot be present-tense feelings as she has to suppress them. Here the enjambement goes between sections, 'slowly melting' on the next line looking almost as though it has dripped down from the line above. The idea of 'melting' is associated with frozen emotions--her feelings are so warm that she finds it difficult to keep up her brave face, though the first line of the next section asserts boldly 'I was brave'.

The image in the third section of the poem--the world as a 'treasure chest', 'overflowing' suggests the possibilities that the world offers to the child--the reasons why he wants to leave home. The world appears rich and full to him, and he is 'intoxicated', or drunk, at he thought of the possibilities. The use of the word 'intoxicated' may also suggest that the speaker feels that he is not quite responsible for his own actions--his desire to leave and his excitement is so strong that he may not have considered all the reprecussions of what he is doing, perhaps.

When the son leaves, the mother describes how she 'released a song bird from its cage'. Although this is described as a simple truth, a literal reality of liberating a pet: 'I went into your bedroom', the image seems strongly symbolic. LIke the 'dove' that flies to the churchyard, the caged bird seems to represent her son and his desire for freedom.

The dove, of course, is a universal symbol for peace, and the speaker's description of it makes her feel anxious, as it suggests again how peace and war are intertwined. She seems to have rushed out of the house (as her son did?) unprepared 'without a winter coat', which suggests anxiety or haste, and her visit to the war memorial and its tracing of its letters strongly suggest that she is expecting her son's name to be engraved there. Leaning against it, she imagines that her body against the upright memorial forms the V-shape of a wishbone, promising perhaps a wish if she breaks her pose. The dove becomes something that looks like a fiction, a decoration, as she thinks back to her son's childhood. If you take the reading that this woman has merely sent her son off to school, then of course her desire to 'hear your playground voice catching on the wind' is a real one--she is hoping to hear her son playing happily at school. It seems more likely, though, that she is thinking of the past, and that she is wishing that he were again a small child, and therefore safe from the perils of war.

The semantic field of the poem is interesting, because it is strongly reflective of the writer's interest in textiles. Images throughout focus around clothing, sewing, or material of one kind or another: 'lapel', 'bias binding', 'blazer', bandage', 'shirts', 'felt', 'tucks, darts, pleats', 'stitch'. To start with, these are literal--it might be significant that the speaker notices the bias binding on the blazer, but it is not symbolic in itself--but as the poem progresses, the language transforms into the metaphorical, first as words are described as 'turned into felt', then as the speaker's nervousness is described as 'my stomach busy/ making tucks, darts, pleats' until finally the dove becomes 'an ornamental stitch' in the final section. Even her action of walking along the edge of the wall is turned into a work associated with clothing: 'skirting'.

This seems to be part of the central division in the poem, between home and warfare. the idea presented thoughout--that the man who goes to war was once a child, and that the memories of him as a child are still powerful to his mother--is put across by an opposition between the domestic and the warlike, so that opposed to this intensely homely semantic field is one of battle, injury and conflict: 'Armistice Sunday', war graves', 'spasms', 'blockade', 'bandaged', 'rounded up', 'steeled', graze', 'brave', 'reinforcements'. Often, the writer juxtaposes words from both fields, or describes something domestic with words that we might normally associate with conflict. Thus, 'reinforcements' become only a scarf or gloves to protect against cold weather, and the 'blockade' is simply the edging of a coat.

AQA Power and Conflict: 'Remains'

The poem 'Remains' arose when Simon Armitage took part in a documentary for Channel 4 in 2007 called The Not Dead  based on the emotional experiences of soldiers returning from conflict, and the post-traumatic stress that they suffered as a result both of what was done to them and what they did to others. The programme inspired a volume of poetry of the same name, written not solely about the experience of conflict, but about the flashbacks and feelings that the soldiers endured when returning to civilian life. The title The Not Dead sums up the key issues that it examines: these men are not dead, they are not traditional casualties of war, but they are not truly alive any more either--they are caught in a sense of limbo between their old lives and their new lives. As ex-soldiers they cannot fit comfortably into civilian life, nor can they return to the life of war. 'Remains' itself is based on the account of a soldier who fought in Basra, and it gives a voice to someone troubled by his actions in war, who re-lives the incident in his mind again and again. It is powerfully linked to Shakespeare's Macbeth in its description of guilt. The title 'Remains' refers both to the 'remains' of the body that the soldier describes, and to the guilt that remains in his mind. He wants to forget the experience, but is unable to do so, the visible 'blood-shadow' that it leaves on the road paralleled by the blood-shadow on his mind.

The poem opens as though half-way through a conversation: 'On another occasion', making it clear that the incident of which the solider speaks was one among many. This conversational tone gives the impression of a dramatic monologue, and it certainly appears to both have ironic elements and also reveal more about the speaker and his state of mind than he perhaps intends. It additionally gives us, as readers, the sense of eavesdropping on what may be a private conversation, something reinforced by the confessional tone later in the poem. The speaker describes an incident when he was sent out with other soldiers to 'tackle' looters in Basra. He shoots one of the looters, and the event comes back to his mind again and again as he thinks through the experience. If the looter was armed, then his action is a justified act of self-defence. If he was not, then he has murdered someone. It is likely that his action would have been seen as justified by the army, given that the looter was ‘probably armed’, but his ambivalent feelings about it are made clear in the repeated phrase ‘probably armed, possibly not’. The 'possibility' is what haunts him, along with the desensitising brutality that he has experienced. 

The use of the word 'tackle', and its connotations of sport, also minimises the action that the soldier was asked to take. Was he instructed to shoot the looter, and 'tackle' is a euphemism that he uses, or was he directly told to 'tackle' him, the decision about what this entailed being left up to him, and the euphemism is in the orders? The poem doesn't make it clear which interpretation is the case, but the casual lexis is in stark contrast to the events that it describes. In this way, it is reminiscent of the lexis used in earlier war poetry to make war seem more acceptable.  Sir Henry Newbolt's Vitae Lampada, for instance, creates a link between schoolboy sport and the courage needed to fight in war, and Jessie Pope picked this up to use in propaganda poetry such as 'Who's for the Game?'--poetry that poets such as Wilfred Owen bitterly objected to ('Dulce et Decorum Est' is probably Owen's most famous counter blast to Pope, but 'Disabled' also poignantly describes how the speaker thought war would be like a football match).

The use of the present tense throughout the poem is striking, creating a sense of continuous action and drawing the auditor--and the reader--into the action that is described. This use of the present tense to describe past actions is known as the historic present and is a strategy which makes past events vivid and immediate. In this case it also makes it clear that the soldier is constantly re-living the events that he describes, which are continually present to him in the dreams and hallucinations that he describes as the poem goes on.  The initial description of the looter's death seems clear and detached, as though language is a barrier that the speaker is using to defend himself against stronger feeling.

 The poem is written in irregular quatrains, loosely tied together with half-rhyme, and concluding with a couplet. The rhymes are not strong in the first stanzas, for instance ‘fire/swear’, ‘side/times’, but get stronger as the poem moves towards the conclusion of the initial account, with what is almost a clear AABB quatrain in stanza 4: ‘agony/goes by’, ‘body/lorry’. This pattern is then repeated, with the following two stanzas again having loose rhymes (‘rounds/out’) and then the seventh stanza again offering clear AABB rhymes: ‘eyes/lines’, ‘land/sand’. The final couplet is unrhymed. In some ways there may be a suggestion that the rhymes indicate the intensity of experience—certainly the way in which they seem to creep up on the reader, with the apparently casual quatrains firming up in these terms, creates a striking poetic effect.

The poem seems to seek to imitate the speaking voice, and the language used is strikingly colloquial, using words and phrases which are associated with the ordinary speaking voice, with a sprinkling of slang: ‘legs it’, ‘mate’, ‘letting fly’, ‘carted off’. Armitage here seems to be trying to imitate the soldier’s idiolect so as to make the effect of reportage more convincing. As such, he's following in the tradition of soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen, who sometimes shocked contemporary audiences with his use of the colloquial in his poems. In 'Remains' the language is initially simple and direct—even brutal: ‘he’s there on the ground, sort of inside out’. As the poem progresses, the language seems to become more sophisticated, with poetic effects such as alliteration becoming more frequent and elaborate: ‘sun stunned sand smothered land’. The use of wordplay, as in ‘near to the knuckle’ partakes of both these linguistic modes—both colloquial and poetic.

The image of the three soldiers all shooting at the running man is a brutal one (especially as it seems as though he is running away as he 'legs it up the road'. The use of 'legs it' again grounds the experience in the soldier's lived everyday life--it is the phrase you would use about someone running away following a minor incident of vandalism perhaps, and not something you associate with war.  At this point we are introduced to the soldier's companions--not named, but anonymised as 'somebody else and somebody else'. They join with him in shooting the man, and this seems to justify his decision as they 'are all of the same mind... Three of a kind', the internal rhyme mind/kind reinforcing this connection.  Again the words used to describe the shooting seem to minimise it: 'letting fly' is a phrase that is more commonly used about someone losing their temper verbally, though it can be associated with physical violence (this verbal connection is subtly reinforced by 'I swear' placed at the end of the line). The phrase is not usually associated with gunfire, and this contrast between language and meaning emphasises the contrast between the soldier's experience and his ability to rationalise it.

Tanaphora at the start of stanza three reinforces the violence of the assault. The three soldiers have clearly massively over-used necessary force in this instance, the violence of 'rips through his life' suggesting the unstoppable force of the bullets from a machine-gun. The hyperbolic image of 'broad daylight on the other side' is almost comic-strip vivid, suggesting a huge hole in the man's torso as he is hit 'a dozen times' by the three soldiers, literally turned inside out by the assault. The shift of the enjambement from the colloquial 'sort of inside out' to the lyrical 'pain itself, the image of agony' gives an aching seriousness to the death, which is then deflated by the bathetic 'one of my mates...tosses his guts back into his body / then he's carted off'. There's a half-reminder here that 'tosses his guts' is actually slang for 'vomits'. The soldiers are not sick at the sight of what they have done, but it's hinted that they might be. The necessity for actually picking up the 'guts' of the dying man is couched in terms that depersonalise him as a problem to be tidied up.

he use of

The key line halfway through the poem: ‘End of story, except not really’ has a strong caesura which indicates how this incident will haunt the soldier on his return to civilian life. The possibility that the looter was not armed haunts him, especially as he has to travel past the spot for the rest of his time in Basra. The use of the term ‘blood shadow’ for the stain that has been left on the street comes to represent a real shadow on his mind, reminiscent of the ineradicable ‘bloody spot’ in Macbeth. Another reminder of Macbeth is the focus on sleep and sleeplessness. In Macbeth, the eponymous hero is haunted by the murders that he has done to get the crown. When he first does the murder, he fixates on his hands, covered in blood. He cannot sleep subsequently, and he and his wife are both haunted with what we would now call post-traumatic stress, endlessly re-living the murder and focusing on its bloodier aspects: . 

The soldier here seems to go through a similar process. Just as Macbeth is unable to sleep after the murder, believing 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', so the soldier  experiences flashbacks when he shuts his eyes: 'blink /and he bursts again through the doors of the bank'. Macbeth explains to his wife how he experiences: 'the affliction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly: better be with the dead, / Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, / Than on the torture of the mind to lie / In restless ecstasy'. In a similar way, the soldier explains how his sleep is disturbed with a vivid juxtaposition of the words 'sleep' and 'dream' with repetitive reminders of the action from earlier in the poem: 'Sleep, and he's probably armed, possibly not, / Dream, and he's torn apart by a dozen rounds'. Like Macbeth and his wife, the soldier can find no respite, 'he's here in my head when I close my eyes'  despite attempts to block his experience with alcohol and pills: ‘the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out’.

Just as Macbeth imagines King Duncan coming out of his grave to haunt him, the speaker of this poem feels that the dead looter is 'here', and 'not left for dead...six feet under in desert sand'. The reality of the haunting is brought home by the final image of 'his bloody life in my bloody hands', the imagery again recalling the strongest and most persistent image in Macbeth, which haunts both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Macbeth as he feels that nothing, not even the 'multitudinous seas' (Act 2 scene 2) can wash the blood from his hands, Lady Macbeth as she sleepwalks, endlessly washing her hands and unable to cleanse them from the blood of the murder as 'who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' (Act 5, scene 1) 

The final irony in the poem comes from the use of colloquialism again: 'bloody' is an expletive as well as a literal description. The speaker's 'bloody hands' are hands covered with blood and also hands with which he is annoyed, just as 'his bloody life' is an exclamation of helpless frustration at the responsibility of war. The looter's life has been in the soldier's hands, and now because of his decision, it will remain, like Macbeth's guilt, staining his 'bloody hands' beyond the time of war.