This is the third part of ‘Myself after her death’, written in December 1990, after the death of Norman MacCaig's wife Isabel. The mixture of bleakness and defiance is very moving; life, in the big sense, continues its ‘endless toil of creation’ and the poet declares his hatred of death, but he has taken a battering. Friendships go on and provide his main comfort. The much younger Scottish poet, Brian McCabe, in a perceptive essay, written about a year earlier, says: ‘The importance of MacCaig's poems about people cannot be stressed too much - indeed, I would argue that one of his most important achievements as a poet is to be found here, in these poems about friends and relatives - their lives and, inevitably, their deaths’. His poems about people, however, are not always affectionate. He took a delight in registering a range of emotion and behaviour not just in others but also in himself. As has been remarked earlier, he saw life as a series of reciprocities, antagonisms and correspondences. He writes with a dash of irony but, for the most part, seriously in ‘Thinking of contradictions':

Of course, there is a larger irony, directed against heaven and gods and godlike destruction, but he needs variousness.