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Visiting Hour

            A poem in which an experience is vividly described is "Visiting Hour" by Norman MacCaig.
             It deals with a visit the poet makes to a dying friend or relative in hospital and the thoughts and feelings that he has while there.
             The poem opens with a powerful sensory image: "The hospital smell". Smell is a potent sense and the reference to the antiseptic and polish atmosphere of the hospital, immediately connects the reader with the experience. The second line conveys the pungency of the odour in the image: "combs my nostrils". The smell is so strong and unpleasant that it physically invades his nose, reaching to the roots of his nostril hairs. He.
             seems, in fact, to have become "all nose", and he describes his nostrils "bobbing" along the corridors. The decoration of the building with its "green and yellow" paint seems to add to the sense of his discomfort, since these are colours often associated with illness. .
             The second verse describes a brief glimpse of a patient being "trundled" on a bed or trolley through the hospital. "seems a corpse". When the bed or trolley is taken into a lift, he imagines that it "vanishes/heavenward" like a soul after death. The third verse describes his agitation at making the visit and his determination to control his emotions. "I will not feel" seems spoken to himself and the repetition of the words, with an enjambement to isolate "feel", underlines his struggle. The further enjambement of "until/ I have to" on lines 9 and 10 also stresses the effort he is making to keep his feelings under control. .
             The fourth verse focuses on the nurses who seem in such contrast to his own mood. They walk "lightly, swiftly", without care, and the unusual word order of "here and up and down and there" in line 12 emphasises their numbers and speed so that they seem to be everywhere. The image of "their slender waists" is contrasted with the "burden/ of so much pain, so/ many deaths" that they carry.


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