Memorial

Question 1

Everywhere she dies

Answer 1

Metaphor: people can’t literally die everywhere

Present tense - he’s not moved on, it keeps happening for him

Death changes everything, no escape

His life is affected in Everest and her death impacts a lot of people

Question 2

Everywhere I go she dies

Answer 2

Repetition to emphasise the fact that it keeps happening, grief is always there

Question 3

No sunrise

Answer 3

Nothing beautiful

Question 4

No city square

Answer 4

Nothing lively or busy

Question 5

No lurking beautiful mountain

Answer 5

No is repeated to emphasise the fact that there is no place he doesn’t think about her

He is always thinking about her

Question 6

But has her death in it

Answer 6

He can’t do anything without thinking about her and feeling the pain again

Question 7

The silence of her dying sounds through

Answer 7

He will never hear her voice again

Shows the emptiness of his life

Paradox

All he can hear is the silence in his life where she would have talked

Question 8

The carousel of language

Answer 8

Metaphor for people talking and their conversations going round and round like the fairground ride

Question 9

It’s a web

Answer 9

Sticky

Intricate

Detailed

Complex

Question 10

On which laughter stitches itself

Answer 10

Laughter is trapped in the web that is death so it is no longer in his life

Question 11

How can my hand clasp another’s

Answer 11

Not moving on

Death has frozen life

Seems impossible to relate to others

Question 12

Thick death

Answer 12

Word choice

Huge and smothering

Question 13

Intolerable distance

Answer 13

Gap between light and death

Can’t bridge gap

Question 14

She grieves for my grief

Answer 14

She is selfless, she’s not scared of dying she just doesn’t want him to be sad

Question 15

Grief

Answer 15

Processing feelings of sadness when someone dies

Question 16

That bird dives from the sun, that fish leaps into it

Answer 16

Painkillers are making her say buzzard things

She’s remembering seeing that

She can see it from her window

Question 17

Crocus

Answer 17

Purple flower that is yellow in the middle

Question 18

Her dying shapes my mind

Answer 18

Gradually her death changes the way he sees things

Question 19

Other words

Answer 19

Change of tone, trying to look at it differently

Consoling words from his friends and family

Question 20

Black words

Answer 20

Words of illness and death

Funeral colour

Mourning and grieving

Question 21

She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me 
That bird dives from the sun, that fish
Leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently 
Than the way her dying 
Shapes my mind - but I hear, too,
The other words,
Black words that make the sound 
Of soundlessness, that name the nowhere 
She is continuously going into

Answer 21

This stanza contrasts beautiful life - bird, sun, crocus -

and the darkness of death - black words, nowhere, soundlessness

Question 22

Soundlessness

Answer 22

Echoes silence from earlier

Question 23

Nowhere

Answer 23

Hell, heaven, afterlife

Question 24

Continuously

Answer 24

Links to everywhere

Question 25

Ever since she died

Answer 25

Past tense

Question 26

She can’t stop dying

Answer 26

Hasn’t let her go yet

Question 27

Elegy

Answer 27

Family member speaking at a funeral

Speech used to remember someone

Question 28

I am a walking masterpiece

Answer 28

Masterpieces are created to convey messages of meaning

Metaphor to compare himself to a work of art created in remembrance to her

Question 29

Ugliness

Answer 29

His pain and suffering

Question 30

I am her sad music

Answer 30

The person left behind becomes the memorial

His feelings and memories are a memorial to her