The Manhunt — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
The Manhunt
The poems
What you need to know
A soldier's wife describes slowly getting close to her husband after he comes home wounded from war, tracing his physical injuries before she finds the hidden damage to his mind.
How Armitage's metaphors turn the husband's body into broken objects, a hinge, porcelain, a rudder, a parachute and a mine, and how the language of searching shows her patience.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'after passionate nights and intimate days', 'only then would he let me trace', 'the frozen river which ran through his face', 'the blown hinge of his lower jaw', 'the damaged, porcelain collar-bone', 'the parachute silk of his punctured lung', 'climb the rungs of his broken ribs', 'the foetus of metal beneath his chest', 'a sweating, unexploded mine / buried deep in his mind', 'Then, and only then, did I come close'.
Form: thirteen couplets that move between half-rhyme and full rhyme, the repeated only then marking each stage of her search, and an ending on closed and close.
Context: Simon Armitage (born 1963), Poet Laureate since 2019; The Not Dead (2008), poems first heard in a Channel 4 documentary that gave voice to veterans of the Gulf, Bosnia and Malayan wars; and the unseen damage soldiers can bring home.
Compares well with: Nettles (wounds and military imagery), My Father Would Not Show Us (a man who hides his pain), One Flesh (distance and closeness in a marriage) and Sonnet 43 (love that lasts through grief).
