1. Memorial By Norman MacCaig

2. Stanza One Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies. No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain but has her death in it. The silence of her dying sounds through the carousel of language, it's a web on which laughter stitches itself. How can my hand clasp another's when between them is that thick death, that intolerable distance?

3. Stanza Two She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me that bird dives from the sun, that fish leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently than the way her dying shapes my mind. – But I hear, too, the other words, black words that make the sound of soundlessness, that name the nowhere she is continuously going into.

4. Stanza Three Ever since she died she can't stop dying. She makes me her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece, a true fiction of the ugliness of death. I am her sad music.

5. Overview 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. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. The Poem – Annotated Stanza One Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies. No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain but has her death in it. The opening line is rather puzzling and almost devoid of tone. Yet the use of poetic techniques ensure that meaning is communicated effectively. Repetition is used to reinforce the idea that the poet cannot escape the awareness that a loved one has passed away. Juxtapostion of ‘ She’ and ‘I’ immediately informs us of the bond between the speaker and the subject of the poem. Thus we have a typical example of MacCaig’s unique skill of using very simple words and phrases to create something quite profound and touching. The use of the list in line two is effective in highlighting the idea that the poet cannot escape the grief that has descended upon his life. Repetition – the repeated use of the negative serves to emphasise how inescapable and ubiquitous her death is for him. Note that the list is not things that one would normally associate with death: the city square would be a place bustling with life while the sunrise and the mountain are often things we associate with beauty. This all 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.

9. Stanza One continued The silence of her dying sounds through the carousel of language, it's a web on which laughter stitches itself… Paradox – here the poet communicates meaning through a statement that appears to contradict itself. It works on a similar way as a deafening silence does – a silence that is so intense that it has the same impact as an extremely loud noise. Here ‘the carousel of language’ points towards human communication and the vibrancy, the joy, the music and the ever changing cycle of language but all of this simply reminds the poet that her voice is no longer a part of this tapestry of sound. Thus he is reminded of his loss. 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. 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. Sibilance – the repetition of the S sound throughout this section enforces the notion of an all pervading silence (death) that drowns out sound and life. Personification – here again MacCaig employs this technique to create an absurd and unsettling image and the idea that his joy, his laughter is bound up in silence.

10. Stanza One continued …How can my hand clasp another's when between them is that thick death, that intolerable distance? MacCaig finishes the stanza on a deeply pessimistic note with a rhetorical question, asking how his hand can clasp another's when death, described as that intolerable distance, lies between them. Death is described as thick, an inevitable, impenetrable barrier between the living and the dead. The rhetorical question forces the reader to consider MacCaig’s doubts and fears. Is he suggesting that the fear of loss is such that he is frightened to become emotionally attached because of his fear about the inevitability of death. Note how again death is once again compared to being ‘distant’. A word that denotes a measurement between to physical points. The metaphor again used by the poet to emphasise the pain of separation that death brings.

11. Stanza Two She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me that bird dives from the sun, that fish leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently than the way her dying shapes my mind. – In this stanza the poet looks initially at how his world has been turned upside down by such great loss. Ideas are subverted to emphasise the idea that the everyday order of his life has been shattered. 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. 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. 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. This is emphasised by the use of alliteration.

12. Stanza Two continued – But I hear, too, the other words, black words that make the sound of soundlessness, that name the nowhere she is continuously going into. 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. 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. 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. For MacCaig language is everything which is no surprise as he is after all a poet. He is looking at the idea that it is language and words that are fundamental to our sense of being. We use words to name things and to make sense of things. Without words there is nothingness. Without words there are no things and no places. This is reflected in this part of the stanza and it is clear that the idea of nowhere and nothingness; the idea of soundlessness is something that concerns the poet. As is witnessed in other poems MacCaig thinks deeply about the void that might come after we pass from this life.

13. Stanza Three Ever since she died she can't stop dying. She makes me her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece, a true fiction of the ugliness of death. I am her sad music. Like stanza one, this stanza opens with a flat, matter-of-fact statement that recapitulates the opening line. 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. 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.(Another term for a song associated with death). He now extends the idea 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. 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. 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.