Armitage's poem dramatises Freud's concept of the return of the repressed — the idea that traumatic experiences, when pushed out of conscious awareness, inevitably resurface in distorted, uncontrollable forms. The soldier's casual tone in stanzas 1-4 represents repression — the deliberate suppression of emotional response. But the trauma returns: 'his bloody life in my bloody hands' erupts through the surface of his controlled narrative. The dead man 'comes back' not as a ghost but as an image the mind cannot delete — what Freud called a repetition compulsion (the unconscious drive to re-experience trauma). Armitage thus positions the poem as a kind of talking cure — the soldier is compelled to tell his story, but telling does not heal. The final word, 'remains', is itself a double entendre: both the dead man's remains (body) and what remains (what is left behind, psychologically). Language, like the soldier, is haunted.