Norman MacCaig
The Scottish Text
Memorial
Poem 4
We are learning to:
 Identify and explain the main ideas and supporting details of a
text
 Apply knowledge and understanding of language to explain
meaning and effect, using appropriate critical terminology
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.
Context
• 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.
Form and structure
•
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.
•
•
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)
• …described as that
“intolerable distance”,
lies between them.
• Intolerable distance – LINK
to Visiting Hour
• Death is described as
“thick”, an inevitable,
impenetrable barrier
between the living and
the dead.
• Use of rhetorical question –
idea of being isolated
• Poet’s feelings in Stanza 1 Denial
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 – 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-offact 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 allconsuming, 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.
Links to Other Poems
•
Because of its PERONAL related content – Memorial can be linked to:
 Aunt Julia– both poems describe an experience / a character vividly
 Sounds of the Day* – both poems explore a normal experience with
greater feelings behind it – loss etc.
 Assisi – both poems utilise vivid imagery when describing a character
/ person and the more significant ideas related to them (death and
illness / religion and hypocrisy)
 Visiting Hour* – both discuss the loss / potential loss of someone
*Best poems to link