Norman Maccaig

National 5 Poetry Norman MacCaig

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1 Contents About the poet………………………………………………………………………………………2 Poetic techniques………………………………………………………………………………….3 How to analyse a poem…………………………………………………………………………4 Visiting Hour………………………………………………………………………………………….5 Assisi……………………………………………………………………………………………………..7 Aunt Julia……………………………………………………………………………………………..9 Memorial …………………………………………………………………………………………….11 Basking Shark ……………………………………………………………………………………..13 Sounds of the Day……………………………………………………………………………….15 Final Group Task………………………………………………………………………………….17

About the Poet

Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910. Although he spent his life in the capital, his mother's Highland past influenced him greatly. She was from Scalpay on Harris and her Gaelic heritage had an enduring effect on MacCaig.

MacCaig went to the Royal High school and then Edinburgh University. He became a primary school teacher. MacCaig then went on to teach at university in 1967.

Most of his poetry is divided between two Scottish locations: Edinburgh and his holiday home of Assynt (a remote area in the North-West of Scotland).

MacCaig’s poetry began as part of the “New Apocalypse Movement”, a surreal style of writing which he later abandoned for more precise and witty observations.

As he became older, MacCaig's fame spread and he received such honours as the O.B.E. and the Queen's Medal for Poetry. By the time of his death in January 1996, Norman MacCaig was known widely as the grand old man of Scottish poetry.

Critical Terminology

2 Technique Definition Example

Simile

“A withered hand trembles on its stalk.”

Giving a non human thing a human quality

Imagery

Word Choice

Rhythm

When the ends of two or more words “Rat” and “bat” have the same sound “Ball “and “hall”

Words that sound as they mean

The train trundled along the track

Contrast

Form Elegy, sonnet, ballad

Structure

Enjambment “Ever since she died She can’t stop dying.”

When a line of poetry is a sentence on its own.

Repetition

Symbolism A heart = love An anchor = hope

The big idea of a text

The surrounding feeling.

How to Analyse a Poem

3 Step 1: Decide what the poem is about and who is speaking Step 2: Identify the themes and messages of the poem. - Why has the poet written this? - What is the poet trying to say? - If the poem gives an opinion about something Step 3: Identify the attitudes and feeling expressed.

- What are the different emotions of the poet/ narrator?

- What is the mood or atmosphere of the poem?

- Is the poet trying to make you feel something? Step 4: Identify the techniques used in the poem.

- Annotate the poem to show the different techniques used by the poet. You should consider all techniques used on the previous page.

- For each technique consider what images, ideas and feelings it creates. Do this on a copy of the poem or as below.

Quote Technique Images Ideas Personal Response

“A withered Metaphor The hand is compared The patient Sad about the hand trembles to a leaf about to fall was once frailty of life. on its stalk.” off its branch. This healthy but creates a picture of a now her life is Sympathy for (Visiting Hour) veined, weak and dwindling as the visitor for almost lifeless hand she becomes whom this must shaking. weaker. be an upsetting sight.

4 Visiting Hour

The hospital smell combs my nostrils as they go bobbing along green and yellow corridors.

What seems a corpse is trundled into a lift and vanishes heavenward.

I will not feel, I will not feel, until I have to.

Nurses walk lightly, swiftly, here and up and down and there, their slender waists miraculously carrying their burden of so much pain, so many deaths, their eyes still clear after so many farewells.

Ward 7. She lies in a white cave of forgetfulness. A withered hand trembles on its stalk. Eyes move behind eyelids too heavy to raise. Into an arm wasted of colour a glass fang is fixed, not guzzling but giving. And between her and me distance shrinks till there is none left but the distance of pain that neither she nor I can cross.

She smiles a little at this black figure in her white cave who clumsily rises in the round swimming waves of a bell and dizzily goes off, growing fainter, not smaller, leaving behind only books that will not be read and fruitless fruits.

5 Task 1:

In groups carry out the four steps of how to analyse a poem. Each member of the group should makes notes in their jotters on each of the four steps.

Task 2:

Textual Analysis

1. Many of the main ideas or concerns of the poem come across clearly in the first two stanzas.

(a) Identify two of these main ideas or concerns from stanza one and two. 2

(b) Show how two examples of the poet’s use of language in stanza one and two help to clarify or illustrate his meaning. 4

2. Identify any structural technique used in stanza three and explain how it demonstrates the writer’s mood. 2

3. Show how any two examples of the poet’s use of language in stanza four effectively contribute to the main ideas or concerns of the poem. 4

4. Identify two examples of imagery in stanza three and explain how these contribute to the concerns of the poem. 4

5. How effective do you find any aspect of the final stanza as a conclusion to the poem?

Your answer might deal with ideas and and/or language. 4

6 Assisi

The dwarf with his hands on backwards sat, slumped like a half-filled sack on tiny twisted legs from which sawdust might run, outside the three tiers of churches built in honor of St Francis, brother of the poor, talker with birds, over whom he had the advantage of not being dead yet.

A priest explained how clever it was of Giotto to make his frescoes tell stories that would reveal to the illiterate the goodness of God and the suffering of His Son. I understood the explanation and the cleverness.

A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly, fluttered after him as he scattered the grain of the Word. It was they who had passed the ruined temple outside, whose eyes wept pus, whose back was higher than his head, whose lopsided mouth said Grazie in a voice as sweet as a child's when she speaks to her mother or a bird's when it spoke to St Francis.

Vocabulary

Giotto - an Italian painter and architect.

Frescoes - a painting done on a wall.

7 Task 1

Considering the four steps of analysing a poem, annotate your copy of Assisi. Your teacher will review this with you.

Task 2

Textual Analysis

1. What four things mentioned in the poem show that the beggar is disabled? 4

2. Select a piece of imagery from stanza 1 and explain what it tells us about Assisi. 2

3. a) What tone is used in the final line of stanza 1? 1

b) How does this line show how unfortunate Assisi is? 1

4. According to stanza 2 what was the purpose of Giotto’s frescoes? 2

5. In the final stanza what image is created of the tourists and why is this appropriate. 4

6. Why is the metaphor “ruined temple” an appropriate way to describe Assisi? 2

7. What message is MacCaig trying to communicate in the final 4 lines of the poem? 4

8 Aunt Julia

Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic very loud and very fast. I could not answer her — I could not understand her.

She wore men's boots when she wore any. — I can see her strong foot, stained with peat, paddling with the treadle of the spinningwheel while her right hand drew yarn marvellously out of the air.

Hers was the only house where I've lain at night in a box bed, listening to crickets being friendly.

She was buckets and water flouncing into them. She was winds pouring wetly round house-ends. She was brown eggs, black skirts and a keeper of threepennybits in a teapot.

Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic very loud and very fast. By the time I had learned a little, she lay silenced in the absolute black of a sandy grave at Luskentyre. But I hear her still, welcoming me with a seagull's voice across a hundred yards of peatscrapes and lazybeds and getting angry, getting angry

9 with so many questions unanswered.

Vocabulary Gaelic – any one of a number of Celtic languages spoken throughout the British Isles. Threepenny bit – a coin worth 3 old pence (Just over 1p in modern value). Peat – decayed vegetation, compressed which is dug up from the peat bogs and used as fuel. Peatscrapes – scars in the bog where the peat has been removed. Lazybeds – the correct name for large beds of earth after the peat has been removed.

Textual Analysis

1. What impression of the speaker does the rhythm and language of the first stanza create? 3

2. What features of Aunt Julia mentioned in stanzas one and two imply that she is a little eccentric? 2

3. What message does the writer convey in stanza 3? 2

4. What tasks does Aunt Julia carry out and what do we learn about her character from these? 4

5. a) What mood is created in the final stanza? 1 b) Give two examples of word choice that create this mood and explain how they do this. 2

10 6. Why is the word “angry” repeated in the final stanza? 2

7. Throughout the poem Aunt Julia is linked with nature. How does the poet create this impression? 4

Memorial 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?

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.

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.

Vocabulary

11 Elegy – a reflective and often mournful style of poem.

Textual Analysis

1. This poem explores how the death of a loved one can linger in someone’s work. How does the first stanza bring out this idea? 4

2. a) What mood is created in stanza one? 1

b) Give two examples of word choice that contribute to this mood. 2

3. Give two examples of imagery used in stanza one and explain their effect. 4

4. What does the imagery used in stanza 2 tell us about how the writer’s work had been affected by his loss? 4

5. In the final stanza MacCaig says “ever since she died she cannot stop dying.” In what sense does he mean this? 1

12 6. In the final stanza the writer compares himself to forms of art. What is the effect if this comparison? 4

Basking Shark

To stub an oar on a rock where none should be, To have it rise with a slounge out of the sea Is a thing that happened once (too often) to me. But not too often - though enough. I count as gain That once I met, on a sea tin-tacked with rain, That roomsized monster with a matchbox brain. He displaced more than water. He shoggled me Centuries back – the decadent townee Shook on a wrong branch of his family tree. Swish up the dirt and, when it settles, a spring Is all the clearer. I saw me, in one fling, Emerging from the slime of everything. So who’s the monster? The thought made me grow pale For twenty seconds while, sail after sail, The tail fin slid away and then the tail.

Vocabulary

13 Slounge – to skulk or act stealthily

Shoggled – shook

Decadent – self indulgent

Textual Analysis

1. What experience does MacCaig describe in this poem and what does it make him reflect on? 2

2. Identify two metaphors used to describe the shark and explain what they tell the reader about it. 4

3. The speaker has a mixture of feelings towards the shark. With reference to the text (lines 2-6), explain what these feelings are and how they are revealed. 4

4. With close reference to language, how does MacCaig develop the idea of ‘He displaced more than water’ in the rest of the stanza (stanza 3) and how does this further develop the idea of the evolutionary process 2

5. a) What is meant by the line “shook the wrong branch of the family tree”? 2

14 b) What is mean by ‘Swish up the dirt and, when it settles, a spring Is all the clearer.’ 2

6. The encounter with the shark caused the poet to reflect upon some big ideas. Comment on two phrases which suggest the poet reflected upon serious issues. 4

Sounds of the Day

When a clatter came, It was horses crossing the ford. When the air creaked, it was A lapwing seeing us off the premises Of its private marsh. A snuffling puff Ten yards from the boat was the tide blocking, Unblocking a hole in the rock. When the black drums rolled, it was water Falling sixty feet into itself.

When the door Scraped shut, it was the end Of all sounds there are.

You left me beside the quietest fire in the world.

I thought I was hurt in my pride only, Forgetting that, When you plunge your hand in freezing water,

15 You feel A bangle of ice around your wrist Before the whole hand goes numb.

Textual Analysis

1. Sounds of the Day is a poem about the breakdown of a relationship. How do the sounds mentioned in stanza one create:

a) A sense of the setting? 2

b) A sense of the relationship ending? 3

2. Explain what structural effects are used in stanzas two and three and the effect these have on the poem. 4

3. What is the significance of the fire being “the quietest fire in the world”? 2

4. What is the significance of the first line of stanza four? 1

16 5. a) What contrast is created between stanzas three and four? 2

b) What comparison is introduced in the final stanza? 2

c) Why is this comparison effective? 2

6. What message is the writer trying to communicate in the final line of the poem? 2

Group Task (six groups required) Stage 1 Each group should pick a different poem and prepare a presentation about the poem. You should include:

 What the poem is about

 Its themes

 Its messages

17  Any poetic techniques it uses

 How the poem makes you feel Stage 2 Create a set of questions that will test your class mates’ knowledge of the poem. There must be at least 8 questions and the question paper should be worth a total of 20 marks. Create a marking scheme to go with your question paper.

Stage 3 All groups should deliver their presentations.

Stage 4

1. Each group should pair with another group.

2. The groups should swap their questions.

3. Once both groups have finished answering the question paper the papers should be marked and discussed.

4. Stages 1-3 should be repeated until all groups have answered questions about all six poems.