In your essay, you should:

• Analyze how Armitage's use of colloquial language and irregular structure reflects the speaker's fragmented mental state.
• Examine the importance of the repeated motif of the body and how it evolves from a physical presence to a psychological specter.
• Discuss how the poem's first-person confessional voice engages both the speaker and the reader in the moral implications of conflict.
• Consider how Armitage portrays war as a source of enduring psychological harm, rather than a tale of heroism or glory.

Remember to

support all points with close textual references, employ precise literary terminology, and maintain a coherent, sustained argument throughout your response.

Guidelines

• Your essay should have a clear, debatable thesis statement in the introduction.
• Support your argument with close textual analysis of at least three specific moments in the poem.
• Think about how form and structure add to the meaning (e.g., the use of enjambment, uneven stanzas, repetition).
• Explore how the speaker's tone changes — or fails to change — throughout the poem, and what this reveals about trauma.
• Conclude by considering the poem's broader implications: what does Remains suggest about the human toll of war beyond just physical wounds?

Assessment Focus

Analysis and evaluation of writer's methods | Personal and critical response to literature