Visiting Hour by Norman Maccaig - Critical Evaluation

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Choose a poem, which describes an animal or place or an event in an effective way – “Visiting Hour” by Norman MacCaig When visiting someone who means a lot to you, while they are in a critical condition, many feelings would be going through your head. In many ways it would be hard to express these emotions in any way but Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, manages to achieve this in his poem “Visiting Hour”, which describes a hard event when going to meet a dying relative. He uses techniques like personification, enjambment and repetition to show his distraught feeling and emotion. In the first line, we immediately know that the poem is set in a hospital. We are told that the smell of the hospital is very strong and overpowering and everyone who has been to a hospital knows it is a smell of a sterile environment. This makes the first line very relatable “The Hospital smell combs my nostrils as they bobbing along green and yellow corridors” This is a light-hearted, unusual choice of words, as you wouldn’t expect nostrils to be combed. This is an effective use of personification. The writer then goes on to tell us that they go bobbing along green and yellow corridors creating imagery of the hospital and helps us imagine what he is seeing. The poet then tells us that an unwell or dead person is familiarly taken past him before disappearing into the lift. The word “trundled” suggests this is a normal and regular action, which is done without much thought or emotion involved. “What seems a corpse is trundled into a lift and vanishes heavenward.” The fact that the poet says, “What seems a corpse” means they must be in a very bad condition because he can’t identify whether they are dead or alive. “Into the lift and vanishes heavenward” acts as an effective metaphor because it can mean that the corpse is going to his/her death but also that they are on
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