Everyone has a relative who loves too much and too wetly, and Thomas McAfee's "The Saga" begins in that familiar territory before quietly turning it into something heavier. On its surface, the poem is a comic portrait of Aunt Alice, a woman "big as a barrel" who terrorised a small boy with affection. But the last two stanzas shift the ground. The frightened child has become a father, and the ritual of being hugged against one's will is about to be handed down to the next generation. The central idea is that love, even when suffocating, is a debt that family obliges us to pass on, and that we do so with a mixture of reluctance, tenderness and something close to guilt.
McAfee builds Aunt Alice almost entirely through the senses. She is introduced by smell ("Sweat and rose cologne") and by touch ("smothering hugs and kisses, / Too wet and adoring"). Notice that the poem never describes her face. She is body and odour, exactly as she would appear to a child at hip height, which makes the memory feel authentically childlike. The word "gallic" is a curious choice here. Its most likely meaning is something like effusive, demonstrative, kissing-on-both-cheeks, though the poem doesn't explain it, and the slightly formal word set against the clumsy wetness of the kisses creates a small comic mismatch.
The comedy deepens in the middle stanzas. The boy "shook behind the juniper" while Alice called, "Where is the child, where?" The line is funny because it sounds like a monster in a fairy tale, and the juniper, a prickly, scratchy shrub, makes a fitting hiding place from so much softness. Then comes the surprise that gives Alice real colour: funerals were "her game." She could lift a "casket lid undone" and cry and scream "like sixty." The phrase is idiomatic and slightly odd (sixty what? sixty mourners, sixty years?), and that looseness suits the speaker's affectionate, half-amused voice. The image of petals "nearly drooping / Before her happy rage" is the poem's richest moment. Grief, in Alice, is an energy so vital that even the flowers wilt before it. The oxymoron "happy rage" captures her whole nature: she is a woman who experiences every emotion at maximum volume, and who seems to enjoy even sorrow.
Formally, the poem is spare. It runs in six three-line stanzas, with no regular rhyme and short, uneven lines, so it reads like conversation rather than song. Occasional echoes ("hug", "hide", "hide behind my legs") do the work that rhyme might otherwise do. The repetition of "hide" is the structural hinge: in the third stanza the speaker runs away from Alice, and in the fifth his sons "hide from her" in turn, "behind my legs." The childhood gesture returns almost unchanged, only now the speaker stands in the protector's place.
That reversal gives the ending its sting. Alice's "generation's dead," the speaker tells us, and the parenthesis makes the fact sound small and offhand. Yet she is somehow still present, still demanding her hugs. Perhaps what the poem suggests is that the speaker feels obliged to preserve her, to keep her affection alive through ritual. His phrasing is startling: "I must lift them up— / Almost in sacrifice." The dash creates a hesitation before the religious word. The speaker is offering up his own children, like a priest at an altar, to be "smothered" in a bosom that is no longer there to receive them, or perhaps one that lingers in memory. The ending also echoes the title. A saga is a long family story handed down through generations, and this one is told in the body: through hugs, smells and rituals of duty.
What makes the poem memorable is its refusal to settle on a single feeling. Alice is both ridiculous and magnificent, a source of childhood terror and the fixed point of the family's emotional life. McAfee lets us laugh at her, then catches us laughing at something we may one day be asked to carry ourselves.