The Manhunt — Simon Armitage (2008)

Simon Armitage is one of the best-known English poets of his generation; he was appointed Poet Laureate in 2019. The Manhunt was written for a 2007 Channel 4 documentary, The Not Dead, which followed veterans coping with the psychological aftermath of modern war. The poem is voiced not by the veteran himself but by his wife, Laura, whose real words Armitage drew on in composing the text. Her husband, Eddie Beddoes, had served in Bosnia and returned profoundly injured.

The poem is distinctive in the Edexcel cluster for two reasons. First, it centres the carer of the traumatised — the partner whose role is to reassemble a life alongside someone who has been changed by service. Second, its form is unusually short and quiet. The poem does its enormous emotional work in small, restrained couplets.

Context

Aspect	Detail
Poet	Simon Armitage (1963–)
Date	2008
Occasion	Channel 4 documentary The Not Dead
Period	Contemporary
Form	Short couplets and occasional triplets
Voice	Wife of a war-affected soldier

The documentary background is important but does not need to dominate a response. The poem is based on Laura Beddoes's account of reassembling her life with her husband after his return. Armitage's achievement is to find a form that can carry that subject without melodrama.

Short summary

The speaker describes a process of gradually rediscovering her husband after his return from war. She begins by finding the "frozen river" of his jaw, the "blown hinge" of his shoulder blade, the "parachute silk" of his punctured lung. She moves through his body, examining wounds both physical and psychological. She finds the "grazed heart" and, finally, the "damaged, porcelain collar-bone". The poem closes with a recognition that her work is continuing — there is more to find, and the long effort of helping him is not over.

Voice and speaker

The speaker is the wife. Her voice is tender, steady, patient, first-person. She addresses the reader, but the real addressee is her husband — or the version of him she is trying to reconstruct. The voice is one of careful, almost forensic attention paid in love.

This voice is unusual in poetry about war: most war poems are written by soldiers or about soldiers. The Manhunt rotates the perspective to the partner at home.

Form and structure

Feature	Detail
Form	Short paired couplets
Lines	Short, often only 4–7 syllables
Rhyme	Half-rhyme, occasional full rhyme
Movement	Body part by body part; descent through the physical
Overall shape	Slow inventory, no climax

graph TD
  A[Jaw: frozen river] --> B[Shoulder blade: blown hinge]
  B --> C[Ribcage: punctured lung]
  C --> D[Skin: old shrapnel]
  D --> E[Mind: buried mine]
  E --> F[Heart: grazed]
  F --> G[Collar-bone: damaged porcelain]
  G --> H[Still searching]

The short couplets are crucial. Armitage could have written a long, dramatic lament; instead he offers small, quiet pairings, each a brief act of attention. The poem progresses by touching one feature, then another. The reader cannot rush through it.

Half-rhyme (e.g. "blown hinge / parachute silk") gives the lines an almost-closure that is never quite complete — which is itself a figure for the husband's half-recovered state.

Language and imagery

Body mapped as landscape. "Frozen river" for the jaw; "blown hinge" for the shoulder blade; "parachute silk" for the punctured lung; "the porcelain collar-bone". Armitage renders the body through a series of distinct, carefully chosen metaphors. Each is a small, precise image of fragility or violence.

The psychological aftermath. "The mind's buried mine" — a metaphor that explicitly figures post-traumatic stress as an unexploded device beneath the surface. Armitage does not dwell on the clinical vocabulary; the single image is enough.

The clinical register of the carer. The speaker's vocabulary — "explore", "trace", "feel" — is almost medical. She is doing what a slow-working healer does.

"Handle and hold, / explore... trace." Verbs of careful, tactile investigation. Love here is practised as tactile attention.

The closing recognition. The poem does not conclude with the husband whole. It concludes with the speaker still working, still looking. That structural refusal of closure is itself a statement: recovery from this kind of injury is not a plot with a final page.

Themes

Theme	How it operates
Love and war	Love is what does the slow work of recovery
The partner's labour	The poem centres the carer, not the combatant
Physical and psychological injury	The poem maps both, with the same attention
Reassembly	Love renders the damaged body whole again, piece by piece
Ongoingness	The poem ends in continued searching

A strong reading notices that the poem revises what "love poem" can mean. It is neither a declaration nor a definition; it is a labour. Love in The Manhunt is what you do with your hands, carefully, over time, for a damaged person.

Suggested comparison partners

Partner	Shared ground	Productive contrast
Nettles	Protective love and war imagery	Scannell's father prevents harm; Armitage's wife repairs it
A Child to His Sick Grandfather	Close attention paid to a suffering body	Baillie's child; Armitage's wife — different generations, same work
One Flesh	Marital intimacy	Jennings's couple are apart; Armitage's speaker seeks to reconnect

Worked paragraph

Both Armitage's The Manhunt and Scannell's Nettles explore protective love in the shadow of war, but they rotate perspective in opposite directions. Scannell's father sees a nettle-bed as "a regiment of spite" and mounts his own "slashing scythe" counter-attack — a veteran's mind projecting military vocabulary onto a domestic scene. Armitage's speaker, the wife of a damaged veteran, works in the opposite direction: she takes military aftermath — "punctured lung", "the mind's buried mine" — and renders it in quiet, tactile acts of care. Her short couplets move body part by body part, refusing climax; the half-rhymes give the poem an almost-closure that is never quite complete, the perfect formal figure for a healing that is not yet done. Scannell's ABAB pentameter is tighter, more composed, and ends on a recognition that the nettles grow back; Armitage's form is looser and ends on a continuation — "and come, to terms". Both poets see that love in a post-conflict world is largely about attention: Scannell's father attends with a scythe, Armitage's wife with her hands.

Key quotations to memorise

• "The frozen river which ran through his face" — the jaw as motionless water; the opening image.
• "The blown hinge of his lower jaw" — damage as mechanical failure.
• "The parachute silk of his punctured lung" — military material as body-tissue; precise, soft imagery.
• "The grazed heart" — psychological wound in a single adjective.
• "The mind's buried mine" — PTSD figured as an unexploded device.
• "Only then would he let me trace / the frozen river" — the conditional; trust earned slowly.

Extended worked paragraph — comparison with A Child to His Sick Grandfather