Overview

Out of the Blue – 12 is a dramatic monologue that gives voice to a man trapped in the North Tower during the 9/11 attacks. It captures his desperation and persistence as he waves for help, knowing rescue is impossible. Simon Armitage focuses on individual suffering within a large-scale tragedy, creating an intimate and haunting portrayal of helplessness.

Main themes

The poem explores terrorism and tragedy, reflecting the horror and chaos of 9/11. It contrasts hope and despair as the speaker clings to life but gradually loses hope. There is a strong sense of the insignificance of the individual amid global catastrophe, alongside determination and desperation, showing the instinct to survive even when escape is impossible.

Tone and voice

The tone is desperate, urgent, and claustrophobic, shifting from persistence to exhaustion. The first-person voice makes the experience intensely personal, drawing readers into the speaker’s fear and isolation. This intimacy heightens the emotional impact of the poem.

Context

Simon Armitage wrote this poem in 2006 as part of a sequence commemorating 9/11 on its fifth anniversary. He aimed to create something “commemorative and elegiac, but not political”, focusing on human stories rather than ideology. The poem was inspired by footage of a man waving from the tower, which became a metaphor for universal terror and heartbreak.

Form and structure

The poem is written in free verse, reflecting chaos and unpredictability. It is composed of seven quatrains (four-line stanzas), giving a controlled structure that contrasts with the panic. The rhythm and rhyme are irregular, with occasional rhymes and repeated ‘-ing’ endings creating urgency. The lack of strict metre mirrors the shock and disorder of the event.

Poetic devices to spot

• Repetition – “waving”, “watching”, “trying” stress persistence and futility.
• Symbolism – the white shirt suggests surrender and hope, and represents the speaker’s identity.
• Metaphor – references to “gills” evoke suffocation and fragility.
• Personification – fire described as “bullying”, making the attack feel cruelly personal.
• Rhetorical questions– express uncertainty and longing for rescue.
• Alliteration and assonance – intensify the claustrophobic mood.
• Enjambment and caesura – reflect urgency and fragmented thoughts.
• Direct address – pleas to unseen rescuers and loved ones heighten emotional impact.

by Simon Armitage

A link to this poem is available in the CCEA Poetry Anthology which can be downloaded from the CCEA website.

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A claustrophobic and visceral account of a trader’s final experiences while trapped in the North Tower during the 9/11 terror attacks, using what the poet has described as a “voice from beyond the grave”. Written in 2006 and published in 2008.

• Title: A pun with a bitterly ironicdouble meaning – “out of the blue” is an idiom or informal colloquialphrase evoking something surprising happening; here it also references the way the terror attacks came in the form of aircraft through a clear blue morning sky.
• Themes: Terrorism, loss, disaster and chaos, hope and despair, determination, desperation, the insignificance of the individual.
• Tone: Desperate, persistent, uncertain, disturbing.
• Speaker: Uses first person to give an intense personal perspective in the persona of a man trapped in the North Tower; this perspective is both different from and supported by the millions who witnessed the terror attack from the ground or on film, and could see the figure of the actual man on whom the poetic persona is based.

• Simon Armitage became Poet Laureate in 2019; he was born in Yorkshire in 1963 and came from a humble background, which is partly reflected in the accessible and everyday language used in his poems. His work is immensely popular, and he has sometimes used his poetry to comment on tragic newsworthy events such as the murder of Sophie Lancaster in 2007, focusing on ‘giving a voice’ to those affected by such tragedies.
  
  Out of the Blue – 12 is one such work – one piece taken from a sequence of 13 individual poems written by Armitage to commemorate 9/11 on the fifth anniversary of the attacks. The full poem sequence was accompanied by a film showing the dramatized character of the speaker beginning his usual day before the catastrophe that will take his life occurs. Armitage wanted to focus on the individual suffering within the larger tragedy and on the bereaved families, telling The Times newspaper: “I wanted to do something which was both commemorative and elegiac, but not political.”
• The World Trade Center was built over a period of years between 1966 and 1975; it housed the New York Stock Exchange and was the financial hub of the United States. It was actually a complex of seven buildings but was known mostly for the ‘Twin Towers’, two skyscrapers that were the world’s tallest buildings at the time of their completion. Towering 110 storeys high over the Manhattan skyline, the Towers were hugely symbolic of America’s global influence and financial power.
  
  On the morning of September 11th 2001, a plane hit the North Tower at 8.46am in what many horrified onlookers assumed was a terrible accident. Seventeen minutes later, a second plane hit the South Tower. It was confirmed that these were intentional terrorist attacks, giving rise to overwhelming fear and horror in those who witnessed the events – including the millions who were watching live via TV news. Al-Qaeda, the Islamist terror group who launched the strikes, had coordinated four attacks altogether that morning, but none were as arresting, shocking and resonant as the Twin Tower attacks; the political, social and cultural fallout still resonates today through American society and across the globe.
• When the hijacked plane struck the North tower between the 93rd and 99th floors, it obliterated all three staircases that served the building, meaning there was literally no route of escape for anyone above the 91st floor. These people were trapped as the plane burned below them and its fire spread to the floors above. The tower stood for 102 minutes after the impact, before collapsing due to structural failure. During those 102 minutes, many people who were trapped above the impact site were burned, died of smoke inhalation, or jumped from the tower to escape the flames; those that remained were killed as the building fell.
  
  Among many horrific aspects of the 9/11 attacks was the fact multiple people in the city were able to film what was going on as it happened and millions more around the world were watching live before the towers collapsed; despite all these witnesses, there was no possible way to rescue any of the estimated 1,355 people who were trapped in the North Tower. One piece of live footage from the day captured a man waving a shirt from the window, desperately trying to alert those below to the presence of the trapped survivors. Armitage based his poems around this footage, saying: “The lens of the camera finds the man in the building, so the poem focuses on him and describes his situation, and he becomes a metaphor for everyone. Everyone’s terror, everyone’s fear and everyone’s heartbreak.”

Only a little context is needed for each poem; where used, it should be applied to the point you're making.

• ‘Out of the Blue’ is a dramatic monologue, spoken by a single character and giving us insight into what he thinks and feels as he is trapped in the North Tower during the 9/11 terror attacks. He has no way to escape and fire spreading to engulf the building. It is a free verse poem, reflecting the chaos and panic of the events in its lack of regular rhythm. ‘Out of the Blue' is divided into seven quatrains (four linestanzas); Armitage noted: “The poem is written in a very controlled way, fairly neat stanzas with the same number of lines in each one… what I’m trying to do there is to contain the tension, to build up that sense of stress and panic.” The line lengths vary to reflect the speaker’s different feelings and thoughts at different points, but the stanzas remain the same length – he cannot escape the structure of the poem’s repeating quatrains, just as he cannot escape the tower.
• The poetic metre is not regular, reflecting the shock and surprise of the attack. Through repeated use of words ending in ‘-ing’ across the poem, Armitage creates a kind of resonance that is akin to a rhythm, but it is not arranged in a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. At times this creates an impression like a chant, showing the fervour with which the speaker is begging to be rescued, but the rhythm always falls away just as it is building – just as his hope of escape falls away.
• The rhyme scheme of the poem is present but not exactly regular. Most stanzas have rhyming words ending the second and fourth lines – some of these are full rhymes, like “burning” and “turning”, while others like stanza three’s “watching” and “washing” are slant rhymes or half rhyme.

• Repetition: Aside from the repetitive nature of the many present participles (present tense verbs ending in ‘-ing’) that Armitage uses to highlight the immediacy and urgency of the situation, there are specific repetitions for effect. “Waving” is repeated four times in the second stanza, emphasising how fervently the speaker is trying to get the attention of someone who will save him and how determined he is to keep going. “Watching, watching” emphasises the terrible knowledge that this event is unfolding live in front of countless people, both in New York City and beyond. “I am trying and trying” is a poignant emphasis of how desperately he wants to be rescued – his efforts are persistent but there is nothing else he can do but wave. No one else is in a position to help him even if they see him.

• Symbolism: The white shirt waved by the speaker is symbolic in several ways. A “white collar worker” is a common description of someone working in a professional office-based job rather than performing manual labour, and was based on the idea of them wearing a white shirt, suit and tie. The high-finance traders in the Twin Towers (of whom the speaker is one) were white-collar workers, and their office was the focus of attack because of the power and money it symbolises. The speaker mentions the “white of surrender”, alluding to a ‘white flag’ of surrender, an internationally-recognised symbol of submission in warfare, waved by those who wished to acknowledge their enemy had won in a battle. They would no longer fight them but would give in peacefully. The speaker, however, claims he is not giving in – he is waving the shirt to get help, taking the only action he can in the circumstances and demonstrating he has hope of being saved.

Through a distant shot of a building burning
you have noticed now
that a white cotton shirt is twirling, turning.

• Rhetorical questions: The wretched uncertainty of the speaker is reflected in five rhetorical questions asked in the course of the poem. The first, “Does anyone see / a soul worth saving?” is a plaintive plea – asking people not only to see him when he is so high up, but to recognise that he is an individual amid the widespread chaos and that he wants to live. “So when will you come?” is insistent; he reminds them he is there and waiting. This is almost childlike in its demand, because at this point he is innocent of the fact that he cannot physically be reached. His increasing desperation begins to show with the next question, which has a tone of indignance, even some sarcasm: “Do you think you are watching, watching / a man shaking crumbs / or pegging out washing?”
  
  There are two further questions, but neither are punctuated with question marks, which suggests the sense of urgency is dying away as he begins to lose hope: “Are your eyes believing,/… I am still breathing” sounds more like a statement than a question, as if he cannot believe he is still alive. The intense poignancy of the last question in the poem, “Do you see me, my love”, is heartbreaking in its futile last-ditch attempt to connect with his loved one. The lack of a question mark robs the inquiry of any energy and helps to suggest what the next line confirms: that he is “flagging”, about to succumb to his untimely death.

• Metaphor: The reference to “gills” is two-fold. Armitage noted that in the footage of the trader waving from the window, the upper levels of the building were designed with long ribs of steel holding them up; the vertical slits on the faces of the tower were reminiscent of a fish’s gills. This metaphor supports the idea of the speaker “still breathing”, but also offers the uncomfortable connotation of a fish out of water, gasping for breath, indicating the building will not last much longer. Armitage also uses personification of the fire that is beginning to consume the upper floors: “The heat behind me is bullying, driving”. The metaphor of the fire as a bullying menace gives a sense of impending urgency and doom, as well as showing how this attack that came “out of the blue” for the speaker feels cruelly personal and focused. Even when he as a specific individual was not the terrorists’ intended target.

• Alliteration, assonance and consonance: As a short poem with intentionally simple language and repetition, ‘Out of the Blue’ is intended to have an intense and claustrophobic feel that mirrors the trapped state of the speaker. Armitage further intensifies this atmosphere by using small pockets of repeated sound to mark our specific moments. Examples of this include the alliterative phrase in “see/ a soul worth saving”, using sibilant ‘s’ sounds to give a sense of plaintive desperation, as though the speaker is so high up that even his loudest shout is more like a whisper. The assonance in “shirt”, “twirling” and “turning” in stanza one repeats the short ‘i’ sound in quick succession. This evokes the shirt going round and round repeatedly as he vigorously waves it, showing the energy and determination with which the speaker starts out to be rescued; later, the consonance of liquid ‘L’ sounds in stanza five’s “appalling” and “wind-milling, wheeling, spiralling, falling” emphasises the horrific ease with which the bodies sail downwards once people make the desperate, terrible decision to jump.

This is not a list of every method or notable use of language and structure in Out of the Blue – 12.

Look at the poem again. Can you find any of the following?

If you have found these methods, consider what you know about the poem and the poet already.

What effects do these methods create? Why has he used them?

• Vitaï Lampada – the poem’s central message of “courage under fire” becomes bitterly ironic when contrasted with the plight of the speaker in ‘Out of the Blue’. This offers opportunity to comment on the differences between those who volunteered to serve in a war and those who were victims of terrorist attacks.

• Bayonet Charge – sharing a visceral sense of confusion and panic in the face of impending death, both poems focus on the desperate instinct to survive when faced with untold violence and destruction; the fate of Hughes’ character remains unknown while the fate of Armitage’s speaker is tragically notorious.

• Easter Monday – there is some parallel between the way in which Farjeon receives the letter of her friend and writes two back to him, unaware he has already been killed. The way in which Armitage gives the speaker in ‘Out of the Blue’ a “voice from beyond the grave.” This confronts the reader with the final thoughts of a person who is trapped alive and cannot be saved.

Use these questions to hone your knowledge of ‘Out of the Blue’, and to practise using your notes and analysis in organised paragraphs that focus on how particular themes or ideas are shown in the poem. There is an example answer in the following section to demonstrate how you can do this.

• How does Armitage create a sense of the speaker’s persistence in ‘Out of the Blue’?
• What does ‘Out of the Blue’ show us about Armitage’s attitude to large-scale tragedy?
• What poetic methods does Armitage use to show the speaker’s changing feelings throughout ‘Out of the Blue’?
• How does Armitage create a disturbing tone in ‘Out of the Blue’?

Below is a demonstration of how to use the material in this section to answer an example essay question. The answer below is not a full essay, but only an extract of a longer answer showing some of the points that could be made.

Q: What does ‘Out of the Blue’ show us about Armitage’s attitude to large-scale tragedy?

A: ‘Out of the Blue’ is an excerpt taken from a sequence of 13 individual poems written by Simon Armitage to commemorate the 9/11 terror attacks on the fifth anniversary of the tragedy. Armitage wanted to focus on the individual suffering within the larger tragedy and on the bereaved families. Telling The Times he wanted to write something which was “both commemorative and elegiac, but not political.” The 9/11 attacks were hugely driven by the symbolism of destroying buildings that represented America’s huge financial and global influence; the fallout from the attacks is still ongoing all around the world. However, ‘Out of the Blue’ is a dramatic monologue, spoken by a single character (the persona of a real-life trader). It gives us insight into what he thinks and feels as he is trapped in the North Tower during the attacks, with no way to escape and fire spreading to engulf the building. By choosing to focus on one person among the several thousand who were killed that day, Armitage makes it clear that a large-scale tragedy is made up of individual people, both those killed or injured and those left behind. Those individuals each have stories worth hearing.

Armitage purposely creates a close and personal account of the tragedy, giving the reader a clear sense of the ongoing trauma and desperation felt by the speaker as he begs to be rescued. The poem is short, with seven quatrains; the line lengths vary but there are always four of them per stanza, constraining the speaker and mirroring his trapped state. Aside from the repetitive nature of the many present participles that Armitage uses to highlight the immediacy and urgency of the situation, there are specific repetitions for effect. “Waving” is repeated four times in the second stanza, emphasising how fervently the speaker is trying to get the attention of someone who will save him and how determined he is to keep going. “Watching, watching” emphasises the terrible knowledge that this event is unfolding live in front of countless people, both in New York City and beyond. “I am trying and trying” is a poignant emphasis of how desperately he wants to be rescued – his efforts are persistent but there is nothing else he can do but wave. No one else is in a position to help him even if they see him. These repetitions create a claustrophobic sense of what the helpless speaker is suffering, making the reader go through it alongside him. A large-scale tragedy is often referred to by the numbers killed or injured, but Armitage focuses on the horrible detail of one person’s situation, helping readers appreciate more fully what people went through that day. He appeals to their sense of humanity to help them better understand the tragic elements of the catastrophe. Not just how large it was.

This essay could go on to make the following points, backed up by evidence from the poem and detailed analysis of that evidence:

• Asyndeton, assonance, consonance and alliteration are all used to help show the intensity of the situation and add to the claustrophobic feel, emphasising the experience of the individual within the large-scale tragedy and showing how important individual experiences are
• The speaker uses direct address throughout the poem in a desperate bid to connect and be seen, showing the plight of the individual in a large-scale tragedy
• Armitage personifies the fire as “bullying”, showing how the attack feels personal to the speaker even though it is meant to cause widespread and symbolic damage rather than hurt him personally.