Maccaaig Summary

In this poem MacCaig portrays beautiful yet unusual images and an admiration of nature and many of its qualities. Small and normal parts of nature are hyperbolized with the use of paradoxical similes, language and imagery.

One of the main qualities, which the speaker seems to admire, is the tranquility and sedateness of nature and just being in nature. He lies carefree “in the cool, soft grass” as he watches nature take its course. While watching nature operate he is also “not thinking”, suggesting that while nature is a very complex while it works, it is also juts not complex at all. He also may just want to enjoy what is around him and thoughts would distract him from nature. MacCaig also compares water to “glass” suggesting that the water is completely still adding on to the effect of tranquility in nature.
Another quality which MacCaig describes is how we abstract nature is, he does this through his use of unusual imagery and paradoxical phrases to describe nature.
The “Straws like tame lightning lie about the grass”, and the water as “green as glass”, when one would think of these things one would image that they would normally be full of life, have now “tame” and tranquil. The swallow also symbolizes freedom and beauty because it “dives up against the dizzy blue”, when most things dive, they dive down into water, this makes the swallow seem like it is defying gravity and going “against” the norm of diving down. The word “dizzy” to describe the “blue” sky, gives a sense of freedom and breath-taking heights. The paradoxes continue when we see “a hen stares at nothing with one eye/ Then picks it up.” To us as humans, whatever it the hen is looking at is “nothing”, because we are just to uninterested in the little things in nature while to the hen, this nothing is food, a vital part of it’s life. Maccraig leaves the reader in amazement at all of the little things we see everyday, without taking a second glance and take for
granted.

The last stanza contains the meaning of the poem and is also the hardest to decode. One way it can be interpreted is that MacCaig is realizing he is just a “self” in a “pile of selves”, just one person in a line of generations and is in the “centre” of these generations “threaded on time”, so as long as time goes on, another generation will come along, he may be “afraid of where a thought might take (him)” as he will remember that he is only a phase in time and he will become a forgotten memory, something that almost everyone can relate to as we all have a fear, however big or small, of being insignificant.