In “Visiting Hour” by Norman MacCaig, the poet very effectively shows the emotions of the hospital visitor without ever mentioning them directly. It does this through the use of figures of speech, imagery, punctuation, and word choice. The very first line of the poem shows the strength of the smell in the building through personification, such as “The smell of the hospital combs my nostrils.” this is seen humorously when the nose stands out in another technique, synecdoche, as we are given an image of “My nostrils as they bob along green and yellow corridors.” In the first verse the poet also uses the sense of sight, as the visitor sees “Green and yellow corridors” And those specific colors together make you think of the spring season, which also connects to Easter and Jesus rising from the dead, symbolizing new life . Hope for the patient to be able to leave the hospital soon. Verse two begins with a shock to the visitor at seeing “What looks like a corpse.” The use of the verb "trundled" is used to suggest to the reader that the patient is being treated as if she is already dead and as if there is no hope for her. This suggests that the person may have died especially as the elevator “fades into the sky.” However it could simply be that they are moving her to another department. She may be transferred to intensive care because she may become sicker. We see that the visitor is very disturbed by this sight in the way the verses are divided and punctuation is used in verse three as he repeats the words, “I will not hear, I will not hear; until necessary.”What the visitor tries not to do is show any kind of emotion and not cry. This is... half the paper... n for "books that won't be read". This shows that in his opinion the woman is unlikely to recover. The technique used towards the end of the poem is an oxymoron as the two words placed side by side contradict each other in “unfruitful fruits”. The fruitless fruits connect to the patient because you have a piece of fruit but it is empty inside, without flavor and in a way it is the same for the patient because she lies there but there is nothing inside her. The reason for the book and the fruit is that they are two empty objects inside. The poem “The Visiting Hour” was a very successful poem in the sense that it was very good at showing the emotions of the visitor through different techniques. The poet seemed very good at making you almost connect and understand both the visitor and the patient. I liked the poem very much, especially the way the poet expressed emotions.