The Manhunt is a poem written by Simon Armitage which talks about both the mental and physical problems that can happen when a man comes home from a war zone. Armitage is a poet who writes about many subjects and hasn’t actually experienced war himself.He said this poem was the closest he has come to experiencing war and reading the poem and other poems should be the closest anyone gets to war in my opinion as it is harrowing and difficult to read. He presents the pain through the damage it causes to a relationship. Lots of metaphors have been used to convey how fragile the man is “blown hinge of his lower jaw,” which suggests his whole face has been torn apart and that it isn’t even his face anymore, instead it is a mechanism which he needs …show more content…
Connotations of “blown” are bombed, ripped up and torn, which sounds painful and implies devastation. Further imagery is used when “damaged, porcelain collar bone,” is mentioned in the next verse again this metaphor suggests that his bones, which are normally considered strong, are now fragile and delicate like a china cup. As we move down the poem, we also travel down his body, which is suggestive of his wife tracing down the damage that has been caused to him. The persona in the poem was a Bosnian peacekeeper and should never have been damaged like this in the war as the war was over and his job was to keep stability and peace. He was shot in the throat and this caused the destruction of his physical strength. His wife is talking in the poem and the structure is used to echo the way issues are not discussed or not effectively dealt with. Each stanza is two lines which are very short, perhaps to echo the way the relationship is damaged, and they now have to have short stilted conversations about what happened as the mental pain is too much for the man to cope with or for the wife to hear about. This suggestion is supported by the phrase “Skirting along,” with the end stopping making
The poem Nettles, written by Vernon Scannell, consists of a single stanza, it has alternate rhyming lines. The poem seems to be a narrative account, focused on the perspective of a father who has viewed an accident involving his son. The poem, The Manhunt, is made up of a series of couplets, which are mostly unrhymed. The poem describes the phases of the wife’s search for answers from her injured husband who has recently returned battered and broken from the Bosnian War. The poem seems to end when
in several different ways, as seen in these two particular pieces of writing. I chose these two poems because they show a real contrast in the style they're written, portraying conflict in ways we wouldn't immediately think about. “The Manhunt" (Simon Armitage) is a poignant piece of writing that focuses on the emotions of an ex-soldier, the poem taking each part of his body and creating an image around it. For example, "climb the rungs of his broken ribs," this is a metaphor used to paint the
Compare the ways in which a difficult relationship is portrayed in “The Manhunt” and “One Flesh” Elizabeth Jennings, author of “One Flesh”, uses the idea of love diminishing over time in order to represent a difficult relationship between the couple. For the couple are “lying apart now, each in a separate bed”, suggesting the separation has gradually increased over a prolonged period of time perhaps caused by domestic tension consequently resulting in a strangely uncomfortable dissipation of the