When she was alive
I had no need for hope.
When she was dying
hope never visited us.
In this cold city snow is falling.
But life works underground and over it
at the endless toil of creation.
Little comfort for me.
But I have blessings; I count them.
They have the names of people.
There are others. But above all
they have the names of people.
They will die, as she did.
They will die, as I will.
And I look at the face of death
and say, I hate you, to destroy such wonders.
This is the third part of ‘Myself after her death’, written in December 1990, after the death of Norman MacCaig's wife Isabel. The mixture of bleakness and defiance is very moving; life, in the big sense, continues its ‘endless toil of creation’ and the poet declares his hatred of death, but he has taken a battering. Friendships go on and provide his main comfort. The much younger Scottish poet, Brian McCabe, in a perceptive essay, written about a year earlier, says: ‘The importance of MacCaig's poems about people cannot be stressed too much - indeed, I would argue that one of his most important achievements as a poet is to be found here, in these poems about friends and relatives - their lives and, inevitably, their deaths’. His poems about people, however, are not always affectionate. He took a delight in registering a range of emotion and behaviour not just in others but also in himself. As has been remarked earlier, he saw life as a series of reciprocities, antagonisms and correspondences. He writes with a dash of irony but, for the most part, seriously in ‘Thinking of contradictions':
Take away the contradictions
and whaTs left? Heaven.
Only the gods
could settle as happy natives
in that place of no contradictions,
that place of certainty, the place of peace.
And who'd want to be there anyway,
unable to enjoy the darling gifts
of rage, jealousy, cruelty, lust
and that power, the truly godlike one,
of destroying our own creations?
Of course, there is a larger irony, directed against heaven and gods and godlike destruction, but he needs variousness.