Memorial 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 diesand 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 theintolerable distanceof death, painfully conscious of itsugliness, 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.
Stanza one
The poem opens with the flat, slightly puzzling statement:Everywhere she dies.Everywhereis repeated for reinforcement in the same line:Everywhere I go she dies. The qualificationI gohelps 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.
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 negativenoemphasises 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.
The poet employs paradox in the linethe silence of her dying sounds through the carousel of language; this works in the same way as the phrasea deafening silence– a silence so intense it makes an impact in the way a loud noise would. Here, this silence is sounding through thecarousel 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 thesilenceof death seems much more profound and serious. There follows a switch of metaphor in which the silence becomes aweb, with its connotations of a deadly trap. On it,laughteris doomed to become stuck – itstitches itself.
MacCaig finishes the stanza on a deeply pessimistic note with a rhetorical question, asking how his hand canclasp another'swhen death, described as thatintolerable distance, lies between them. Death is described asthick, an inevitable, impenetrable barrier between the living and the dead.
Stanza two
The opening of this stanza involves a subversion of the usual order by assertingShe 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 howthat bird dives from the sunandthat 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 iscarvedor 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 conjunctionbutto do likewise.
What follows is a metaphorical image of him hearingother words, black wordswhich 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 oxymoronicsound of soundlessness, which echoes the earlier paradox in stanza one. There is also a chilling image of hercontinuouslygoing into anowherethese black wordsname. Death is presented as a kind of metaphorical journey that has no destination and never ends.
Stanza three
Like stanza one, this stanza opens with a flat, matter-of-fact 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 shecan’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.
He now extends the notion of himself as the product of a literary imagination when he describes himself as awalking masterpiece/a true fiction of the ugliness of death.The termmasterpieceis used satirically to convey how successful his transformation into a mascot for death, despair and despondency has been. The oxymoronictrue fictionconveys jointly the idea of him being a (reversed) literary representation of death’s horror orugliness, andtrueconveys 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.
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 isnever 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.