The manhunt

The manhunt by Simon Armitage

The manhunt is written by the view of a soldiers wife, the soldier who has been seriously injured during the war and has returned home. The poem reflects to the reader what it is like to live with the mental and phyical injuries of the war, attanied on active service.

 The poem is made up from a series of couplets, mostly of which are un rhymed. This creates the sense of fragmintation which mirrors the wifes feeling, and how she is trying to peice all of them together, as she seeks to understand her husbands pain and mental state.

The poem decribes the phases of a search that the wife is trying to carry out on her husband, to find out more about him. The poem ends when the search is brought to a close.

The title of the poem is a metaphor in iteself. The use of the word manhunt can be taken quite literally, she is trying to find the husband underneith the injuries that he has attained. The real meaning of a manhunt is to try and catch a criminal. She is trying to find the husband that she lost after the war.

Words and phrases such as "explore" and "handle" are prominent words that hightlight her search for her husband, which nearly always come at the beginnig of the sentence. The words mentioned above all describe the gentle searching that the woman is carrying out on her husband.

The woman narrating refers to the different parts of her husbands body "metephorically". She contrasts then to inanimate…