In ‘Nettles’, Vernon the relationship shown is the relationship that is shared between a father and his young 3 year old son who had fallen into a bed of stinging nettles. In ‘The Manhunt’, the poem Simon Armitage writes about the relationship that is shared between a wife and her husband who is an injured soldier who has just returned home from war. Both of these poets write about and explore the relationships and the sympathetic feeling that is felt by both the narrator of the poem (The father for Nettles, and the wife for The Manhunt) towards the other person in their relationship in the poem.
Both poets, Vernon Scannell and Simon Armitage use varied language techniques to describe the pain that the other person in their relationship is feeling and how this other person in this relationship needs to be protected from being hurt. In ‘The Manhunt’, the injured soldier in the poem is being compared to fine china, for example his collar-bone is described as “the damaged, porcelain collar-bone.” To the reader, this shows and emphasises how extreme his injuries really are and how fragile they have made the soldier. His punctured lung is described as extremely delicate and as if it’s “parachute silk”. This use of imagery show how concerned and tender his wife is for her husband and how she wants to do all she can to protect him. Vernon Scannell also uses the war imagery in ‘Nettles’ as he describes his sons accident. He compares the nettles to weapons and says that they look like “spears” and he later goes on to call them a “regiment”. The use of imagery that Scannell has used help the reader to understand what the poem is really about, and that is the helplessness of parents trying to always be there to protect their children, when this is not always going to be possible. The father was unable to protect his son from the pain that he experienced from falling