“the ruined temple outside,”
The contrast is in the dwarf himself, how he is so ugly, deformed, and ruined. However the inside of the dwarf is a ruined temple as he used to be happy and probably didn’t care to much about what other people though of him but after years of being frowned upon and looked down on he would have become ruined inside and he would begin to feel worthless.
The last contrast I shall look at is the church its self, how it is so beautiful on the outside and so beautifully decorated but the way the church works is the total opposite. For example the church was built to help the poor, yet the priest leaves the poor dwarf sitting outside all alone while he shows the eager tourists around the church drawing their attention away from the deformed dwarf.
The next technique I’m going to study is the hypocrisy. In the poem it explains how the church was
“built
in honour of St Francis, brother
of the poor, talker with birds,”
St Francis gave up every thing he had to help the poor but after he died the church spent thousands of pounds building a church in honor of him instead of spending money on schools, hostels, hospitals and homes. I think that if St Francis was still alive he would be horrified to see a poor dwarf sitting on the steps, not being allowed into a church that was built for the poor.
Another technique I noticed Norman MacCaig used was extended metaphors. The first one I noticed was
“The dwarf with his hands on backwards
sat, slumped like a half-filled sack
on tiny twisted legs from which
sawdust might run,”
This compares the dwarf to two things the first a half-filled sack which made me think of a sack of potatoes round and lumpy at the bottom and falling over at the top. This gives the reader a clear picture of what the dwarf looks like. The second comparison is to a rag doll as they used to be filled with sawdust and would split easily, this makes the reader think that the dwarf is very fragile. The second extended metaphor which caught my eye was
“A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly,
fluttered after him as he scattered
the grain of the Word.”
In this metaphor the author implies that the tourists are like hens the way they rush after the priest taking in all the information he gives them without even thinking about it. They were so busy looking at the church admiring its beauty and listening to the priest’s information that they didn’t even notice the poor dwarf sitting on the steps and how the priest just ignored him.
A further technique Norman MacCaig uses is shocking the reader. The parts of the poem which most shocked me were mainly the parts describing the dwarf.
“with his hands on backwards”
this revolts the reader and also makes them feel sorry for the dwarf.
“whose eyes
wept pus, whose back was higher
than his head,”
I feel this is a good description as now the reader has an even clearer picture of how ugly and deformed the dwarf looked. It was these clear descriptions that made the poem memorable for me.
In this essay I have shown why my chosen poem, 'Assisi' by Norman MacCaig was memorable for as it is very honest and up front and made me aware of issues I didn’t know existed. I had also never thought that a church would go against what it was built for.
