The poem "Notes on a Winters Journey and a Footnote", written by Norman MacCaig is a thought provoking Scottish poem. MacCaig uses stereotypical landscapes and weather to emphasise his feelings throughout the poem

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Write about a poem that is essentially Scottish and has a thought provoking theme. Discuss the poets techniques, with particular reference to: word-choice, imagery, structure or any other appropriate feature.

        

        The poem “Notes on a Winters Journey and a Footnote”, written by Norman MacCaig is a thought provoking Scottish poem. MacCaig uses stereotypical landscapes and weather to emphasise his feelings throughout the poem. I shall be showing how MacCaig shows these emotions referring to word-choice, theme and structure.

        The poem “Notes on a Winters Journey and a Footnote” is about MacCaig himself travelling on a journey from Edinburgh to the very north of Scotland to visit a friend who passes away just before he arrives there. Throughout this journey MacCaig emphasises and shows the reader that the poem is Scottish by describing the places where he stopped and set off from, “Edinburgh”, “Ullapool” and “Inchnadamph”. He also describes other aspects of which are found mainly in Scotland such as, “stags” and “lochs”. Each and every one of the six stanzas shows a different stage in which he is at in the journey allowing the reader to see the changes in his attitude and emotions at that specific time.

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        The first stanza outlines a description of a typical Scottish countryside setting. This is shown by the way in which the snow is described, “almost faultless”. This imagery is tied in with the description later in stanza one when MacCaig saw “two stags” with “cold noses and “yellow teeth” giving an overall impression to the reader that he was in the countryside.

        In the second stanza a theme of death is present. This is because of the way in which MacCaig describes “On the loch’s eye a cataract is forming”. A cataract is a clouding of the eye's natural lens. ...

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