1. Remained/printed memories?
Remains
Page 37
What’s with the title?
Remains of what?
Bodies?
Mind?
Remained/printed memories?

2. AO3- context, poet, time, message
MY MESSAGE IS:
The effects of war on our daily life.
The horrors of war.
This poem is from a collection of poems called ‘The Not Dead’ (looks at soldiers’ experiences of war).
true story of a soldier discharged from war during the Iraq War.
The soldier killed someone for the first time when men were looting a bank.
When he went home, he used drink, drugs and crime to cope.

3. “I’ve just come back from a place where everyone wants me dead”
Media influenced him to go to war.
“24 hours a day that feeling of butterflies”
He said he told the army he needed counselling after killing someone for the first time and he was laughed at.

4. AO2- Structure 7 stanzas of 4 lines The last stanza is just two lines
Soldier tried to control his emotions, tried to control his life BUT the memory of killing someone will always have control over him.
7 stanzas of 4 lines
The last stanza is just two lines
2. Lots of enjambment where lines carry onto the next.
The memories are spilling out
The stanzas look controlled like he does on the outside, but inside he isn’t in control.

5. Stanza by Stanza Analysis
Begin mid action
Reader doesn’t know what the other occasions where- just like how soldiers had no idea what would come their way next.
On another occasion, we get sent out
to tackle looters raiding a bank.
And of them legs it up the road.
Probably armed, possibly not
Vert colloquial (chatty) language. Every day words for what seemed like an everyday event for this soldier.
Pause to show how calm he seems. Carefree and casual.

6. Stanza by Stanza Analysis
Syndetic listing (lots of ands) and repetition of “somebody else”. Like he wants to emphasise that he wasn’t the only one to blame.
Well myself and somebody else and somebody else
are all of the same mind,
so all three of us open fire.
Three of a kind all letting fly, and I swear
Euphemism – doesn’t sound as bad as saying shooting bullets
Repetition of three- he doesn’t want to take all of the blame

7. Stanza by Stanza Analysis
Shift to violent imagery.
Personification of gunfire ripping through his life.
Demonstrative “this” in “this looter” shows soldiers didn’t care about who had died. They had no identity to them.
I see every round as it rips through his life
I see broad daylight on the other s
So we’ve hit this looter a dozen times
and he’s there on the ground sort of inside out
“sort of” shows he can’t describe it properly it was so gruesome

8. Stanza by Stanza Analysis
Uncomfortable violent imagery paired with casual/carefree tossing- juxtaposition of ideas
Verb “tosses” very casual
Pain itself, the image of agony.
One of my mates goes by
and tosses his guts back into his body.
Then he’s carted off in the back of a lorry.
“carted off” casual, no care for life or death at war. Bit like the burying party in Exposure.

9. Stanza by Stanza Analysis
Compare
Stanza by Stanza Analysis
The shadow is like how the photographer sees “blood-stained into foreign dust”- can’t escape the horrors of conflict
Keeps talking to us directly- telling a story
End of story, except not really.
His blood-shadow stays on the street, and out on patrol
I walk right over it week after week.
Then I’m home on leave. But I blink
Full stop in middle of the sentence- he thought the pain would stop when he went home AO2 STRUCTURE

10. Stanza by Stanza Analysis
Parallelism with line 4 “probably armed, possibly not” CYCLICAL structure- HE CAN’T ESCAPE THE THOUGHTS OF WAR
Adverb “again” repeatedly thinks about the moment the looter came out the bank.
and he bursts again through the door of the bank
Sleep, and he’s probably armed, possibly not.
Dream, and he’s torn apart by a dozen rounds
And the drink and drugs won’t flush him out.
Normally flush a fever or disease out. Idea of conflict infecting his mind.

11. Stanza by Stanza Analysis
“here” it’s happening right now.
Metaphor- using war language now he is at home but when he was at war he was using chatty language
He’s here in my head when I close my eyes,
Dug in behind enemy lines,
Not left for dead in some distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land
Or six-feet-under in desert sand.
The “sun” and “sand” are happy places he could experience at home but they are ruined by war.

12. Stanza by Stanza Analysis
Thinks that he still can see blood on his hands. He feels like he is guilty.
Links to Macbeth
but near to the knuckle, here and now,
his bloody life in my bloody hands.
“bloody” could be his speech- showing anger and frustration. Why is it his fault?

13. What does it link with?
War Photographer -how war ruins normal life/ can’t escape it - both try to be casual e.g. “pre-lunch beers” Bayonet Charge - the horror of war “threw up a yellow hare in a threshing circle its mouth wide” Exposure - both written in present tense - could contrast how Exposure is WW1 and this is modern war - both show horrors of war