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| Question | Answer |
| Visiting Hour | Norman MacCaig |
| 'The hospital smell combs my nostrils as they go bobbing along green and yellow corridors' | Metaphor helps to underline the strength of the smell - just as a comb brushes hair, the odour assaults our sense of smell. 'bobbing' has pleasant connotations - trying to trick himself that the experience will not be bad |
| 'What seems a corpse is trundled into a lift and vanishes heavenward' | assumes the body is dead because death is on his mind - we know the person is not dead as they are not going down to the morgue |
| 'I will not feel, I will not feel, until I have to' | denial; talking to himself to keep strong and delaying his emotions |
| 'after so many farewells' | farewells are either in death or in health - they say goodbye to people whether they live or die |
| 'white cave of forgetfulness' | could represent either white curtains around a bed or she could be in a coma |
| 'A withered hand trembles on its stalk' | flower imagery |
| 'into an arm wasted of colour a glass fang is fixed, not guzzling but giving' | drip in her arm; fang could be from vampire or animal; patient seems under attack |
| 'black figure in her white cave' | could be death coming to collect her |
| 'leaving behind only books that will not be read and fruitless fruits' | he brought gifts but they are useless; shows the futility of the situation |
| Memorial | Norman MacCaig |
| 'Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies' | repetition of 'everywhere' for emphasis - he can't escape the process and the loss is pervading his life |
| 'No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain' | repetition of 'no' - ubiquitous death for him and beautiful things have become tainted with death |
| 'The silence of her dying sounds through the carousel of language' | paradox - language is compared to a fun situation, carousels do not go anywhere, designed for amusement, profound and serious in contrast to line before |
| 'It's a web on which laughter stitches itself' | it is a deadly trap; suggests laughter is doomed |
| 'She grieves for my grief' | strong bond between characters; the sick can't stand to see the poet sad and suffering |
| 'bird dives from the sun, that fish leaps into it' | reversal of the normal order of things, which ties in with death, as it seems unnatural |
| 'No crocus is carved more gently than the way her dying shapes my mind' | flower; the beauty of the flower contrasts with the devastation of death |
| 'black words that make the sound of soundlessness' | paradox; horror of the oblivion of the grave |
| 'the nowhere she is continuously going into' | death is the journey that has no end, because as an athiest, the poet believes that she has no place to go to |
| 'Ever since she died she can't stop dying' | everything he does and everywhere he goes he can't stop seeing her death. His psyche is perpetually tortured by this overwhelming experience |
| 'She makes me her elegy' | his grief is so all consuming, he has become the physical body of a lament |
| 'I am a walking masterpiece, a true fiction of the ugliness of death' | he has become a mascot for death, despair and despondancy |
| 'I am her sad music' | shows that he is hopelessly pessimistic; all aspects of his consciousness are filled with grief and sorrow |
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