Poetry Analysis Of The Shout By Simon Armitage

Poems are majorly filled with content that has an underlying meaning opposed to what is initially perceived.Simon Armitage is able to describe an experience of an old friend committing suicide to the audience in his poem “The Shout” through the use of allegories and metaphors along with intentional line breaks to assist this point. The poem “The Shout,” strategically commences by alluding to the fact that the boy the author is describing was someone that he did not remember or know well, which is a crucial point later in the poem.This is illustrated when Armitage writes, “me and the boy whose name and face I don’t remember”(Armitage). He is indicating that the person he is writing about was a mere afterthought and it had been years …show more content…
He did this because he needed the validation from the author and the knowledge of knowing that he mattered to someone.Whenever he would scream and the author would raise his hand, it was a parallel for him needing emotional attention and the author being a recipient of this call and responding to it. It also explains the “gunshot hole in the roof of his mouth”(Armitage) that the boy was found with twenty years later as a metaphor for his difficulty in communicating his emotional …show more content…
This allegory ties into the boy still playing the “hearing game”. He moves to Western Australia, the farthest he could travel, to see if anyone would reach out to him to demonstrate that they cared. By doing this he set a negative self-fulfilling prophecy against himself. He distanced himself immensely to test if anyone cared enough about him to reach out, but by doing this he caused all his acquaintances to instead forget him which then to him it translated as no one caring, hence causing his