Explore the Ways That Simon Armitage Presents the Relationship in ‘The Manhunt’ The relationship in ‘The Manhunt’ is presented quite clearly by Simon Armitage. He uses a clever combination of a love poems beginning and carefully intertwines it with the horror and shock of war. By doing this, he is able to convey to the reader the physical and emotional pain of Eddie Beddoes, around whom the poem is based. At the beginning of the first stanza the line ‘passionate nights and intimate days’ suggests to the reader that the poem is a traditional love poem to start off with, but the reader soon finds out that that is wrong: ‘Blown hinge of his lower jaw’ which shows the reader that this is not a traditional love poem. At the start of many stanzas, including the first, there are the words ‘Only then’. This use of anaphora evokes a feeling of a long slow process of healing. In the tenth stanza, Simon Armitage describes the bullet that injured Eddie Beddoes as a ‘foetus of metal’. The many connotations of this could imply that the damage received has the potential to grow and grow, just like a baby. Also, the juxtaposition of the two word ‘foetus’ and ‘metal’, bring a contrast between the innocence of a baby and the horror of war. The poems has also been subtitled ‘Laura’s Poem’ because Laura Beddoes is the wife of Eddie Beddoes and the poem is from her perspective. This means that all of the exploratory verbs such as ‘explore’, ‘Widened the search’ are about her rediscovering who her husband is after he came back from war. This takes a long time as we know because of the anaphora of ‘Only then’. She starts to find out that the pain is not merely physical but also emotional. We can tell this from the
