Norman MacCaig, “Visiting hour”: Revision Note
Writing A Critical essay on the Poem
You have some good notes on how to write a critical essay. Use these, and any practice essays you have done, to revise how to organise your essay on “Visiting Hour”. One effective means of revision is to take a number of sample questions and plan how to answer these.
Select the most relevant and appropriate question. Good questions to look for are:
questions referring to a particular event
questions referring to the poet’s personal experience (his ideas, feelings, etc.)
If you do not have a question which include one of these ideas, you should still be able to answer:
questions referring to poetic techniques (language, style, etc.)
In this type of question you are being asked to comment on how effectively the poem is written - the use of metaphor, for example. Note that comments on poetic techniques/language should be included in ALL critical essays on poetry.
Three important aspects of the poem - theme, structure, and language and style - are dealt with more fully below.
About the Writer
Norman MacCaig was widely regarded as one of the most important Scottish poets of the twentieth century. Born in Edinburgh (in 1910) but from a Highland family (his grandparents were native Gaelic speakers), his poetry took Edinburgh and the Highlands, particularly the North-West around the Assynt area of Sutherland, as his two favourite subjects for writing.
He began writing before the Second World War, but his most typical work dates from the 1950s to the 1980s. In several books of poetry in this period, MacCaig developed a style of short poems in which an observation of an everyday incident, a setting, or an experience leads on to a comment - sometimes with wry humour - about human nature, or about himself.
Themes in the Poem
“Visiting hour” describes in one sense an everyday event: the writer is visiting someone - unnamed in the poem - who is ill and in hospital. The writer turns this incident, however, into a reflection on a serious subject. He is forced to think about illness and death because of this experience, and the poem describes or suggests his own feelings, ideas and reactions.
In the poem MacCaig describes his own growing feeling of tension and apprehension as he approaches the hospital ward, afraid of what he may have to experience himself. He includes a series of personal observations of the activity he sees around him in the hospital. He then ends the poem with his realisation that his visit has failed because he has been unable to communicate with - or help - the woman.
In this poem the reader can therefore detect a number of possible themes. The writer is facing up to a personal fear - illness/death. He is also reflecting on his experience, and so learning something important/a truth about himself. The poem may also be viewed as a poem about growing old, as the woman in the hospital seems to be elderly.
Structure of the Poem
The poem is structured into 6 verses. Verses 1 to 4 form a unit within the poem, describing the poet’s movement through the hospital as he approaches the ward where he is planning to visit. Verse 5 then describes the actual meeting with the woman he has come to visit. Finally in verse 6 the poet tries to imagine how the visit has affected the woman, and suggests his own reaction to the visit.
The lay-out of the poem - the use of verses and poetic lines - has been deliberately structured by the poet. There is not, however, a regular pattern of similar line lengths, or stressed syllables per line, or lines per verse (sometimes referred to as the metre of the poem). MacCaig has chosen to write in an irregular pattern to suggest aconversational tone in the poem - as if he is telling the reader a story or anecdote. This is a form of poetry sometimes referred to as free verse. (Notice than rhyme, another way of producing regular pattern in poetry, is also missing in this poem.)
This irregular pattern can also be seen in MacCaig’s habit of running his lines on into the next line rather than regularly placing the main punctuation stops at the end of lines (this means he often does not use end-stopped lines, i.e. lines with a clear pause/ punctuation at the end of the line). In this way, MacCaig can draw attention to words by the way he positions them in particular lines: for example, “heavenward” is placed in a line of its own (verse 3) and so catches the reader’s eye, adding to the effectiveness of the word-choice. Look for other examples where this technique places particular words first in a line, or by themselves.
Verses 1 and 2, each of which is a single sentence, describe the writer’s arrival at the hospital, and suggest his nervousness as he walks towards the ward he has come to visit. He imagines the hospital smell - probably the heavy smell of disinfectant - is assaulting his senses and he almost hallucinates that a passing patient is being sent to heaven. This nervousness becomes clear in verse 3, when the writer states his reluctance to examine how he feels.
Verse 4 continues the description of the hospital scene. This verse focuses on the nurses whose activity - and ability to cope - is observed and admired by the writer, and described in several memorable phrases.
Finally in verses 5 and 6 MacCaig reaches his destination. Verse 5 is subdivided into 4 sentences, reflecting the several different observations and thoughts which occur to the poet when he enters the ward. He sees the woman’s bed surrounded by white curtains, and as he approaches he sees that his fears have been justified: the woman is very ill, too ill for him to get close to her (and so he is unable to console her).
The final verse shifts viewpoint, as MacCaig tries to imagine what the woman’s view of him might be. He concludes that he is unrecognisable to the woman - only a shape (“this black figure”) which appears to move erratically because her senses or consciousness is impaired (the bell for the end of the visiting hour thus makes “swimming waves” while the writer seems to move “clumsily” and “dizzily”).
This leads to his final thought that his visit has achieved nothing, symbolised by items mentioned in the final lines: “books that will not be read/ and fruitless fruits”. These lines imply the writer’s own sense of paradox that he has brought these things hoping to make the woman feel better, only to discover instead that he can do nothing and that the situation is hopeless.
Language and Style
Explanation of the poem’s main ideas/ themes should refer to the literary techniques and language used by MacCaig (language use can simply be the choice of a particular word or phrase to get across a particular idea). This means you will need quotations of examples with comment on their use in the poem. Usually this means you should explain the ideas that are suggested by the quotations and then comment on why the writer wants to suggest these ideas.
Think about how the following quotations contribute to the meaning of ideas in the poem, and the effect the writer achieves by writing in these ways. You will be expected in a critical essay to quote accurately, then explain the meaning of the quotation, and finally to comment on why the writer has written in this way - to evaluate how well the writer gets across his main idea or message. Check that you understand all the possible meanings of the words used as well. [Key words are underlined to highlight them.]
Imagery:a)metaphor
a)metaphor (continued) / “The hospital smell/ combs my nostrils” (lines 1-2)
“their slender waists miraculously/ carrying their burden/ of so much pain” (lines 13-15)
“a white cave of forgetfulness” (line 20)
“a withered hand/ trembles on its stalk” (lines 21-22)
“a glass fang is fixed” (line 25)
“between her and me/ distance shrinks” (lines 27-28)
“the distance of pain” (line 29)
“the/ black figure in her white cave” (lines 31-32)
“the round swimming waves of a bell” (line 34)
b)symbolism / “books that will not be read”, “fruitless fruits” (line 38)
Sound:
alliteration / “a glass fang is fixed” (line 25)
“not guzzling but giving” (line 26)
Word-choice:
a)repetition / “I will not feel, I will not
fee, until
I have to” (verse 3)
“so much pain ... so many deaths ... so many farewells”(lines 15-18)
b)emotive language / “what seems a corpse” (line 5)
“trundled into a lift” line 6)
“vanishes/ heavenward” (line 7)
[Note: other expressions in the poem also have an emotive impact - the choice of word affecting the emotional response of the reader]
c)euphemism / “so many farewells” (line 17)
Style:
a)use of humour or absurd ideas / “my nostrils/ as they go bobbing along/ green and yellow corridors” (lines 5-6)
b)unexpected phrases or ideas / “here and up and down and there” (line 12)
“eyes move/ behind eyelids too heavy/ to raise” (lines 22-24)
“guzzling” (line 26)
“growing fainter, not smaller” (lines 35-36)
Glossary
wasted of colour / In this context wasted means lacking in colour or having had colour removed, suggesting the idea that illness has produced a physical decline or decay in the woman - the woman is “wasting away”, i.e. wearing out ( -linking to the image of the “withered hand” in verse 5).fruitless fruits / MacCaig here uses a play on words to suggest his sense of helplessness. Fruitless can be read in its figurative meaning: something that is useless or in vain. It can also be read literally as meaning unflowering, or barren and sterile - an apparent contradiction in ideas when associated with fruit.