Norman MacCaig

“Scottish Text Question”

Memorial

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Learning Intention•We are learning to: annotate the text and identify the use of poetic techniques.

Context• In an interview MacCaig stated: ‘We look at an object

with all the previous experiences which lie behind us of what a tree is or what a mountain is and since everybody’s experience is necessarily different from everybody else’s, in a sense we are not looking at the same mountain.’

• In the poem ‘Memorial’, published in 1973 in the collection The White Bird, the poet describes the impact of a loved one’s death. Everything has changed for him.

Activity: The big question

• Before reading: How does one deal with death of a loved one?

Question

•Discuss how MacCaig organises the poem and how he expresses his sense of loss.

Images of loss•In groups, pick out some images of loss that are created in the poem.

•Highlight some words that helped create these images.

Repetition and loss• List examples of where MacCaig uses repetition and

explain what effect he achieves by using this technique.•MacCaig never mentions the woman’s name. he uses

‘she’ throughout the poem. Why does the poet do this?•MacCaig also uses a lot of verbs. List them and say

what tense they are in. What is the poet trying to do here?

• This poem is an elegy, a poem or song that is a lament for the dead, for a beloved person in MacCaig’s life. That person is probably MacCaig’s sister, Frances, who died in 1968 as this poem was published in 1971.

• Memorial is a sad and beautiful poem about how the sense of loss of the poet’s dear one pervades every aspect of his life. Her death, he makes clear, is not for him an event that has its place in the near past, already a part of history.

• Instead the process of her dying stays with him constantly: the opening states, “Everywhere she dies” and in the final stanza, “she can’t stop dying”.

Context

• MacCaig’s poetry is often characterised by its lightness of touch, his playful use of language, particularly metaphor – but always to razor-sharp effect. • Here, he retains razor-sharpness in his use of metaphor, but the playful,

light touch is entirely absent. Instead he is immersed in the “intolerable distance” of death, painfully conscious of its “ugliness”, and painfully conscious too of the all pervading absence of his dear one.

• MacCaig was an atheist. As such, in the face of death, there were no easy comforts for him of promises of life or resurrection beyond the grave. For him death presented an awful finality. Still, the act of writing such a powerful, memorable and skilfully constructed poem was itself an act of literary art that in a sense raised the poet’s consciousness above the profound, melancholic state he experienced at this time.

Context

• This poem is written in free verse, and like all of MacCaig’s poetry, the themes and central ideas are readily accessible through conversational style and the simple language.

• Written from a first person stance in the past tense, the poem is divided by stanzas into three main sections.

• In the first stanza, the speaker introduces the subject of his meditation, the death of a loved one. In the second he reflects and explores the impact of this painful experience while reaching a conclusion of sorts in the final stanza, by reiterating the assertion made in the first line of her death being everywhere, ever present.

• The fluidity and looseness of the structure also helps to reinforce the key message of the poem which focuses on death and the grieving process. Death of a loved one itself represents a formlessness, a loss of structure, the disintegration of close bonds of love and affection. Hence the poet reflects this in the way he constructs the poem.

Form and structure

Themes• The central theme of the poem is the sense of unending grief that is felt when someone we love dies. • MacCaig creates a tone which is almost nihilistic and utterly hopeless in its despairingly bleak outlook. • Nevertheless, there is an occasional glimpse of optimism and beauty contained within the image of the crocus, which is “never carved more gently than in the way her dying shapes my mind.”• This seems to imply one of the abiding effects of his grief is

that it will forever and indelibly continue to shape and impact on his creative work.

Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.

• The poem opens with the flat, slightly puzzling statement: “Everywhere she dies”.

• “Everywhere” is repeated for reinforcement in the same line: “Everywhere I go she dies”.

• The qualification “I go” helps us to understand what is meant by this– the poet cannot escape awareness of the death of his loved one.

• These statements are simple, direct and matter of fact.

• The juxtaposition of the “I” and the “she” immediately informs us of the bond between the speaker and the subject of the poem.

•Blunt opening line•Repetition of “Everywhere”•“Go” – poet trying to move on?•“She” – loved one lacks identity – ambiguous•“Everywhere I go she died” - Inversion

No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain

• There follows a patterned list of places where her death, for him, is to be found: “No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain.”

• The repeated use of the negative “no” emphasises how inescapable and ubiquitous her death is for him.

• The specific choice of the situations in which he feels her death most keenly is also significant as they are not usually associated with death - a city square is usually bustling with people, while sunrise and mountains are associated with providing aesthetic pleasure.

• This suggests that, such is the impact of her death, these places and experiences have now become tainted with death and grief pervades every facet of his existence.

• “No” – Emphasising the negatives (Repetition)

• Sunrise, city square, beautiful mountain – typical romantic venues (LOOKING AT PICTURES?)

• “lurking” – present tense

• Listing – building up to a climax

• Syllables increase as line goes on

but has her death in it.

•But – enjambment – emphasis (Change?)

•Her – again, lacks identity

•Full stop - finality

The silence of her dying sounds through

•Silence…sounds – alliteration (sibilance) •Dying – present tense again

•Poet focusing on sound – silence overpowering him?

The silence of her dying sounds through the carousel of language, it's a web

• The poet employs paradox in the line “the silence of her dying sounds through the carousel of language”; this works in the same way as the phrase “a deafening silence” – a silence so intense it makes an impact in the way a loud noise would. • Here, this silence is sounding through the “carousel of

language”. In this metaphor language is compared to something light-hearted and frivolous, so a carousel is something that goes round in a pointless fashion, going nowhere, purely designed for amusement. By contrast the “silence” of death seems much more profound and serious.• By contrast the “silence” of death seems much more

profound and serious. There follows a switch of metaphor in which the silence becomes a “web”, with its connotations of a deadly trap. On it, “laughter” is doomed to become stuck – it “stitches itself”.

• Carousel – going round

• Language – words of sympathy

• It’s – referring to the silence

• Web – caught up in it but also not part of it

on which laughter stitches itself. How can my hand

•Laughter – loved ones (attempting to comfort him)

•How can my hand….. – poet’s feelings of despair

clasp another's when between them

• MacCaig finishes the stanza on a deeply pessimistic note with a rhetorical question, asking how his hand can “clasp another's” when death…

• Clasp – tight grip / holding onto memories

• Another’s – holding hands / shaking hands / thoughts of future love?

is that thick death, that intolerable distance?

• Thick death – metaphor (Grief is like a fog that we cannot get through)

• Intolerable distance – LINK to Visiting Hour

• Use of rhetorical question – idea of being isolated

• Poet’s feelings in Stanza 1 - Denial

•…described as that “intolerable distance”, lies between them.

•Death is described as “thick”, an inevitable, impenetrable barrier between the living and the dead.

Stanza 2

She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me

• The opening of this stanza involves a subversion of the usual order by asserting “She grieves for my grief”.

• Again this reinforces the bond the two shared while she was alive implying she couldn’t bear to see him sad and suffering.

•She grieves – feelings of love / concern / sympathy towards the poet.

•Dying – present tense

that bird dives from the sun, that fish

• In his melancholic imagination she is permanently caught in the act of dying, and he pictures her telling him how “that bird dives from the sun” and “that fish leaps into it”. • Both of these images represent a

reversal of the normal order of things. • The bird should fly towards the sun,

and the fish should dive into the depths of the sea away from it. Death, by implication, is seen as a reversal of the natural state of living.

•Nature imagery – connotations of natural order / creates a sense of calmness

leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently

• These images are, in their way, things of beauty in their constructs of language.

• MacCaig acknowledges this in the comparison of the way his mind is shaped by them to the way a crocus is “carved” or shaped by nature.

• A stark contrast is made, though, at the end of the stanza. Reinforcing this contrast is the use of both a dash to indicate a change of direction and contrastive conjunction “but” to do likewise.

•Crocus…carved – alliteration•Carved – connotations of intricacy / pain?•Crocus – symbol for hope and renewal?

than the way her dying

shapes my mind. – But I hear, too,

•Use of dash•Hear – links back to the ideas of sounds

the other words,

• What follows is a metaphorical image of him hearing “other words, black words” which whisper to him of the horror of the oblivion of the grave. • This is conveyed in a number

of ways: again by a paradox, specifically the oxymoronic “sound of soundlessness”, which echoes the earlier paradox in stanza one.

•Words – condolences and sympathies from friends and well-wishers

black words that make the sound

•Black – metaphor – connotations of death / misery

of soundlessness, that name the nowhere

• There is also a chilling image of her “continuously” going into a “nowhere” these black words “name”. • Death is presented as a

kind of metaphorical journey that has no destination and never ends.

•Soundlessness – Wife has died. Sibilance•Nowhere – Heaven?•That name – God? Poet appears to be unconvinced

she is continuously going into.

• Into – vague / ambiguous. Connotations of death

•This stanza appears to be a flashback to when the loved one was alive.

•Poet’s feelings in Stanza 2 - Anger

Stanza 3

Ever since she died

•Back in the present moment, after loved one’s death•Died – end of line EMPHASIS

• Like stanza one, this stanza opens with a flat, matter-of-fact statement that recapitulates the opening line: “Ever since she died/she can’t stop dying.” • The enigmatic nature of this

statement is now clear to us in the overall context of the poem. We realise it is within the poet’s consciousness that she “can’t stop dying”– his psyche is perpetually tortured by this overwhelming experience.

she can't stop dying. She makes me

•She – enjambment•Dying – present tense •Can’t stop – involuntary•She makes me – his grief is her fault / feelings of anger and denial•Blunt

• A further simple statement follows as he begins to reach his conclusion: “She makes me/her elegy”. • An elegy is song or poem

associated with death, emphasising that his grief is so raw, so profound and all-consuming, he identifies entirely with it to the exclusion of all else - he has become a physical embodiment of a lament.

her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece,

•Her elegy – He personifies her death and the grief she has left behind•Masterpiece – strength of grief / connotations of greatness / he is the ultimate example of grief

• He now extends the notion of himself as the product of a literary imagination when he describes himself as a “walking masterpiece/a true fiction of the ugliness of death.” • The term “masterpiece” is

used satirically to convey how successful his transformation into a mascot for death, despair and despondency has been.

a true fiction

•Paradox•Her death doesn’t feel real

• The oxymoronic “true fiction” conveys jointly the idea of him being a (reversed) literary representation of death’s horror or “ugliness”, and “true” conveys the completeness of this transformation.

of the ugliness of death.

•Ugliness – this image doesn’t fit in with the rest of the poem•Connotations of dying with an illness

I am her sad music.

•Sentence on its own•Relates again to the ideas of sound•Poet accepting of sound again?

•Poet’s feelings - Acceptance

• The final simple line sums up one of the central ideas in the poem: “I am her sad music”. • This hopelessly pessimistic note again emphasises the ceaseless, all-encompassing nature of the grief and sorrow that consume him and pervade every aspect of his consciousness.