Time and Space: the Persistence of Sound in Simon Armtage’s Poem “the Shout”

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Time and Space: The persistence of sound in Simon Armtage’s poem “The Shout” Trying to find out what the range of the human voice is, the narrator of this poem and his school friend carry out a simple experiment whereby the latter shouts and the former signals with his arm if he has heard the shout or not. They expect the range of vision to be further than that of sound. In the end, however, even when the other boy is out of sight, the sound of his shouting still carries on. The sound is the only thing that the narrator remembers despite the time and space between him and the school boy. In the beginning of the poem the narrator already states the he does not remember much about the boy: We went out into the school yard together, me and the boy whose name and face I don’t remember. He cannot recall what the boy was named or how he looked. The poem also starts rather abruptly, as no reason for their experiment is given. However, in the following sentence it is explained what they are trying to do: “We were testing the range / of the human voice:”. The testing is done by the narrator signalling if he can still hear the boy. The sound takes a while to reach the narrator, so he hears something that was shouted slightly in the past. The expected outcome of the test is that the narrator will at some point still see the boy, but not hear him. This does not happen, however, and he loses sight of the boy. Out of bounds, he yelled from the end of the road, from the foot of the hill, from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell’s Farm – I lifted an arm. So even though the boy goes further and further away from the school yard, the shout is still audible. In this way, their experiment was a failure. In the next stanza, we learn that the boy committed suicide long ago: He left town, went on to be twenty years dead with a gunshot hole in the
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