Remains: probably armed, possibly not

Does a memory play back like a recording? It feels that way: what you saw is what you saw. In a famous experiment in nineteen seventy-four, people watched the same film of a car crash. Asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other, they guessed faster than people asked about cars that hit. A week later, some of the smashed group remembered broken glass that was never there. One word changed the memory. Simon Armitage's soldier has the opposite trouble: one word, probably, is stuck in his memory, and nothing will shift it. Where that word sits, and why it returns, comes once the patrol has been told.

Remains is still in copyright, so this video quotes short pieces of it; have the anthology open if you can. A soldier is talking, and the whole poem is his speech. He and his patrol are sent to deal with looters raiding a bank. One of them runs off up the road, and the soldier describes him as "probably armed, possibly not". Three soldiers open fire together. He says, "I see every round as it rips through his life". Not through his body: through his life. Notice the way he talks: slang, mates, a story told the way you would tell it to friends. That casual voice is a monologue, one speaker talking to us, and the casualness is what makes the violence so hard to hear. The looter's body is carted away in the back of a lorry. Where does the poem first try to stop: the shooting, the body carted away, or the last line? Just after the body is carted away, when he says, "End of story, except not really." He tries to close the poem halfway through and admits he cannot, so everything after it is that failure to finish.

The second half of the poem moves from the street to his home and his head. First, "His blood-shadow stays on the street", and on patrol he walks over it week after week. A shadow belongs to a living body; this one belongs to a dead man, and it does not move. Then he is home on leave, and he is not safe there either. When he blinks, the looter bursts through the bank doors again. When he sleeps, he is probably armed, possibly not, all over again. Listen to the time, too. The patrol is told as one occasion among many, a story from a tour of duty. By the end the looter is in his head, now, whenever he closes his eyes. A flashback is a memory that arrives as if it were happening now, so it is told in the present tense. Why does Armitage repeat that one phrase in the flashback?

Because the doubt has not gone away. The same phrase is said twice, once as a fact on patrol and once as a symptom at home. The poem is built out of a doubt that has changed job, not disappeared.

The doubt is not all that stays. In his head, the looter is "dug in behind enemy lines". That is army language for soldiers holding a trench deep inside the other side's ground. Soldiers who have dug in are very hard to shift. So the war has not ended for him. It has moved into his own head. And it ends with no escape: "his bloody life in my bloody hands". Bloody is the swear word he would use anyway, and it is also the blood. The slang and the guilt arrive together, and the poem stops. You might want to call this PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. As a single word, that is fine. The analysis is in showing the poem doing it: the repeated phrase, the move from one day on patrol to a man haunted every night, and the sentence that tries to end the story.

Five short pieces of Remains do the work in an exam answer. "probably armed, possibly not", once on patrol and once in the flashback: the doubt he could live with on duty is the doubt he cannot live with at home. Each round "rips through his life": not his body, so the speaker sees a whole life destroyed and cannot unsee it. "End of story, except not really": the poem tries to finish and refuses, so the structure is the trauma. The "blood-shadow" on the street: a shadow should belong to a living body, and this one belongs to the dead and stays put. And "his bloody life in my bloody hands": guilt and slang in the same word, and the poem stops there. In the cluster, Remains answers the reality of conflict and what conflict leaves behind, because the killing happens on the street and the damage happens at home.

Let's see what stayed. Each line returns with a gap. The looter was probably armed, possibly what? Not. Possibly not: the doubt the whole poem is built on. Now the halfway line: end of story, except not what? Really. "End of story, except not really": the attempt to close that fails. Try the street: his blood-what stays there? Shadow. A blood-shadow, the dead man's mark that never moves. One more, a new one: how would the flashback say "the doors of the bank were open"? In the present tense: the doors of the bank are open, and he bursts through again. The memory arrives as if it were happening now. Most memories can be reshaped by a single word. In Remains one word, probably, will not shift, and it replays until it has become the whole of the man remembering it.

Show where the poem tries to stop, and why it can't, and you know this one: a thumbs-up, and you never need it again. If not, save it, and come back to it later in the week.

Next in the chapter: Bayonet Charge: you wake up already running. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, twelve.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.