Simon Armitage

The poem is written in the first person; the speaker is setting the scene against which his violence erupted.

We learn that he had been ill and away from work on sick leave, but his boss was intolerant and insistent that he return.

He has responded to the pressure and returned to work, ironically hitching a lift to where he picked up his hire car.

The language is almost conversational: it is the language of first-person narrative; there is no metrical beat, lines are of irregular length, there are frequent pauses and some enjambement.

Some of the details provide the trappings of middle-class materialistic values, safe and appropriate. The speaker has an “ansaphone”; the car he has hired is a safe, economical, mid-sized vehicle – an Astra; ironically, they are symbols of what is normally a safe lifestyle.

o The use of italics in line 3 emphasises the annoyance felt by his boss: he is being told off, and his boss is shouting; this idea of being dominated by someone else is picked up with the personification of the “ansaphone” which was persistently “screaming”.

This stanza focuses on the hitch hiker, whom the speaker picked up in Leeds. Why did he pick up a hitch hiker in the first place? It is hard to think he was pre-meditating his later act of violence; perhaps it was a sense of middle-class pity, to support those forced, for financial reasons, to try and hitch.

The speaker is reporting the words of the hitcher, who seems devoid of the pressures felt by the speaker in the first stanza: he has no job, no responsibility, no accountability. The freedom of the hitcher forms a stark contrast with the way in which the speaker is fettered by responsibilities.

The hitcher is at one with the elements – the sun and the wind – and his worldly possessions are summed up in a toothbrush, whilst the speaker has the pressures of work, of hiring a car and living by the rule of others, whereas the hitcher lives by his own rules, not chained by time.

The monosyllabic words in the language used by the hitcher reflect the simplicity of his life, and its lack of complications. The language is redolent of a hippie drifter.

By Stanza 3, the speaker has snapped, driven into a frenzy of violence by the hitcher, whom he sees as a layabout who contributes nothing to society but of whose lack of responsibilities the speaker is no doubt envious.

The enjambement reflects the fact that the speaker has lost control and the simplicity of the language captures the violent, thuggish behaviour.

o The attack is made worse by the use of the krooklok as a weapon: again, what is normally a symbol of middle-class security ironically represents anything but safety and presents a graphic image of an atrocious and unprovoked assault. The sense of achievement and pleasure in his driving skills experienced by the speaker, who in no way lost control of the car during the frenzied attack, suggests psychopathic behaviour and is unnerving for the reader. The ‘matter-of-fact’ attitude of the speaker, reflected in basic everyday language, as he moved down into third gear suggests no sense of horror or remorse on his part and again exacerbates the sense of horror and disbelief felt by the reader.

The fourth stanza continues in the same vein, as the speaker ejects the hitcher from the car.

The use of the word “bouncing” suggests the hitcher is like a ball, an inanimate, lifeless object and the plain, matter-of-fact language used by the speaker again emphasises the total lack of any sense of conscience: it is like describing an event of which he has not been part, from the point of view of onlooker, not participant or architect.

o The reference to the speaker and hitcher being about the same age perhaps, in part, accounts for the violence by bringing home the lack of responsibilities and the freedom of the hitcher, contrasting with the pressures of life experienced by the speaker.

The poet uses enjambement to link the end of Stanza 4 with the start of Stanza 5.

The personification of the breeze suggests the simple pleasures life brought to the hitcher; there is an idyllic sense of pleasure and a feeling of being at one with nature and with life.

The speaker acts as if nothing has happened, with a return to the mundane and routine, with the mention of the weather forecast.

o The poem ends with an unpleasant expression of a total lack of care, all the more poignant because of the use of slang in “Stitch that”. The reader does not know how badly injured the hitcher is, or indeed if he is dead. Neither does the speaker. The poem has a dismal and desolate ending.

Speaker HitcherShackled by work commitments

Freedom from work and commitments

Materialistic possessions Essential possessions only

Mundane language Poetic language

Interested only in the impact of the elements

A child of the elements

Moral ugliness Moral beauty

Realistic Idealistic

Influenced by other people Influenced by nature only

Yuppie Hippy – free spirit

Violence Peace

Violence Crime Disturbed mind First-person narration Power Responsibilities