Visiting Hour annotations

Question 1

Visiting Hour (title)

Answer 1

Sets the scene in place and time

Question 2

The hospital smell combs my nostrils

Answer 2

• Sets scene by referring to place
• Sounds painful, smell is painful/pungent

Question 3

as they go bobbing along green and yellow corridors.

Answer 3

• Synecdoche: focus on nostrils shows how overpowering the smell is, creates humorous image
• Colours connote vomit/pus

Question 4

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

Answer 4

• Assumption of corpse indicates where speaker’s thoughts are
• Enjambment focuses on ‘vanishes’, focus on death
• ‘heavenward’: hopeful, MacCaig didn’t believe in an afterlife

Question 5

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

Answer 5

• Repetition, talking to himself, denial
• Enjambment, staccato rhythm, short verse, monosyllabic words –> tension

Question 6

Nurses walking lightly, swiftly, here and up and down and there,

Answer 6

• Connotations of easy efficiency
• Unexpected word order creates jerky rhythm

Question 7

their slender waists miraculously carrying the burden

Answer 7

• Suggestion of health, slight but with strength
• ‘miraculously’: shows his difficultly with coping compared to the nurses

Question 8

of so much pain, so many deaths, their eyes still clear after so many farewells.

Answer 8

• Repetition emphasises nurses’ responsibility
• Able to see unclouded by fear/sentiment, contrasts with speaker

Question 9

Ward 7. She lies / in a white cave of forgetfulness.

Answer 9

• Short sentence & caesura suggest abrupt stop
• Literal and metaphor: white noise/static, caves people were left to die in

Question 10

A withered hand trembles on its stalk.

Answer 10

Connotes flowers; beauty and fragility

Question 11

Into an arm wasted of colour a glass fang is fixed, not guzzling but giving.

Answer 11

• Vampire image, word choice makes scene seem obscene
• Alliteration suggests his disgust

Question 12

And between her and me distance shrinks till there is none left but the distance of pain that neither she nor I can cross.

Answer 12

• Image conveys desperation/helplessness
• Longest line in the poem, shows the drawn out emphasis
• ‘can cross’: creates image of the rubicon, the afterlife, mythology

Question 13

She smiles a little at this black figure in her white cave

Answer 13

• She understands the futility of communicating but is reassuring anyway
• ‘black’: he is an intrusion, could connote death

Question 14

who clumsily rises in the round swimming waves of a bell

Answer 14

• Shows he has lost control, he can’t suppress his feelings
• Visual words to describe sound, metaphor of drowning man seeking land (drowning in his emotions)

Question 15

leaving behind only books that will not be read and fruitless fruits.

Answer 15

• Oxymoron: he visits and brings gifts but knows he cannot change the final outcome, shows futility
• ‘fruitless fruits’: alliteration like a sigh