📖 Key Terms

📖 Key Terms

Colloquial register

Everyday, informal language — slang, contractions, casual phrasing. Armitage uses colloquial register to show how combat has normalised violence for the soldier. The gap between this casual tone and the gravity of the content is itself an argument about what conflict does to language and feeling.

Enjambment

Running a sentence or clause beyond the end of a line or stanza without a pause. Armitage uses enjambment across stanza breaks to enact the poem’s argument: just as the soldier cannot contain his guilt within a closed chapter, the poem cannot contain itself within tidy stanzas.

Allusion

A reference to another text, person, or event. Armitage’s "bloody hands" alludes to Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where she cannot wash the blood from her hands despite repeatedly trying. The allusion positions the soldier’s guilt as something ancient, literary, and impossible to extinguish.

Dramatic monologue

A poem in which a single speaker addresses the reader, often revealing more about themselves than they intend. Armitage structures Remains as a dramatic monologue — the soldier’s attempt to tell a matter-of-fact story unwittingly becomes a confession of trauma.

Semantic field

A cluster of words drawn from the same area of meaning. Armitage uses a semantic field of military language ("rounds", "enemy lines", "dug in") that begins in its proper context (warfare) and ends applied to the soldier’s own mind — showing how the war has colonised his interior life.