In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop

First published: 1976, in Geography III

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“In the Waiting Room” describes a child’s sudden awareness—frightening and even terrifying—that she is both a separate person and one who belongs to the strange world of grown-ups. The poet locates the experience in a specific time and place, yet every human being must awaken to multiple identities in the process of growing up and becoming a self-aware individual.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote about this experience as it had happened to her many years before she wrote the poem. Published in her final collection, it is considered one of her most important poems. The speaker in the poem is Elizabeth, a young girl “almost seven,” who is waiting in a dentist’s waiting room for her Aunt Consuelo who is inside having her teeth fixed. In the manner of a dramatic monologue or a soliloquy in a play, the reader overhears or listens to the child talking to herself about her astonishment and surprise. She tries to reason with herself about the upwelling feelings she can hardly understand. The result is a convincing account of a universal experience of access to greater consciousness.

In the long first stanza of fifty-three lines, the girl begins her story in a matter-of-fact tone. The place is Worcester, Massachusetts. On a cold and dark February afternoon in the year 1918, she finds herself in a dentist’s waiting room. In plain words, she says that the room is full of grown-ups in their winter boots and coats. She picks up an issue of the National Geographic because the wait is so long. She is proud that she can read as the other people in the room are doing.

She looks at the photographs: a volcano spilling fire, the famous explorers Osa and Martin Johnson in their African safari clothes. Then scenes from African villages amaze and horrify her. A dead man (called “Long Pig”) hangs from a pole; babies have intentionally deformed heads; women stretch their necks with rounds of wire. Their bare breasts shock the little girl, too shy to put the magazine away under the eyes of the grown-ups in the room.

To recover from her fright, she checks the date on the cover of the magazine and notes the familiar yellow color. Suddenly, a voice cries out in pain—it must be Aunt Consuelo: “even then I knew she was/ a foolish, timid woman.” The voice, however, is Elizabeth’s own, and she and her aunt are falling together, looking fixedly at the cover of the National Geographic. One infers that Elizabeth might have slipped off her chair—or feared that she might—and tried to keep her balance.

In the second long stanza of the poem (thirty-six lines), Elizabeth attempts to stop the sensation of falling into a void, a panic that threatens oblivion in “cold, blue-black space.” She reminds herself that she is nearly seven years old, that she is an “I,” with a name, “Elizabeth,” and is the same as those other people sitting around her.

She does not dare to look any higher than the “shadowy” knees and hands of the grown-ups. She understands that a singularly strange event has happened. Questions arise in her mind. Why is she who she is? Why should she be like those people, or like her Aunt Consuelo, or those women with hanging breasts in the magazine? She heard the cry of pain, but it did not get louder—the world sets some limit to the panic.

Two short stanzas close the monologue. The first, in only four lines, reverts to a feeling of vertigo. The hot and brightly lit waiting room is drowned in a monstrous, black wave; more waves follow. Then, in the six-line coda, her everyday consciousness returns. It is wartime (World War I lasted from 1914 to 1918) on a cold winter afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts, February 5, 1918. The experience that disoriented her is over. Here, at the end of the poem, the reader understands that Elizabeth Bishop, a mature and experienced poet, has fashioned the essence of an unforgotten childhood experience into a memorable poem.

Forms and Devices

For the voice of Elizabeth, the speaker of “In the Waiting Room,” the poet needed a sentence style and vocabulary appropriate to a seven-year-old girl. Bishop relied on the many possibilities of diction and syntax to create a plausible narrator’s tone.

The words spoken by Elizabeth in the poem reveal a very bright young girl (she is proud of the fact that she reads). Almost all the words come from Anglo-Saxon roots, with few of the longer, Latin-root forms. The plain verbs—I went, I sat, I read, I knew, I felt—are surrounded by the most common verb, to be: “I was.” The last two stanzas, for example, use “was” and “were” six times in ten lines. A beginner in language relies on the “to be” verb as a means of naming and identifying her situation among objects, people, and places. “What is that?” comes early to a one-year-old with a vocabulary of very few words. In her reliance on the verb “to be,” Bishop shows an exact ear for children’s speech.

The nouns and adjectives indicate a child who is eager to learn. She names the articles of clothing: “boots” appear in the waiting room and in the picture of Osa and Martin Johnson in the National Geographic. Perhaps the most “poetic” word she speaks is “rivulet,” in describing the volcano. She could be quoting from the article she is reading—the caption under the picture. Similarly, “pith helmets” may come from the writer of the article. In the next line, Elizabeth does specify that the words “Long Pig” for the dead man on a pole comes directly from the page.

Along with a restricted vocabulary, sentence style helps Bishop convey the tone of a child’s speech. Most of the sentences begin with the subject and verb (“I said to myself . . .”) in a style called “right-branching”—subordinate descriptive phrases come after the subject and verb. Short sentences of three to six words are frequent: “It was winter”; “I was too shy to stop.”

Bishop’s skill in creating an authentic child’s voice may be compared with the work of other modern authors. Henry James created a novel in a child’s voice, What Maisie Knew (1897). The child Maisie learns that even if adults often tell her “I love you,” the real truth may be just the opposite. Another modern author, Joyce Carol Oates, has written a novel in a child’s voice, Expensive People (1968). Ideas of violence and antagonism to adults are examined in a child’s experience.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.

Boland, Eavan. “An Unromantic American.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14 (Summer, 1988): 73-92.

Fountain, Gary. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Kirsch, Adam. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.

MacMahon, Candace, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 1927-1979. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980.

Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Motion, Andrew. Elizabeth Bishop. Wolfeboro, N.H.: Longwood, 1986.

Parker, Robert Dale. The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Schwartz, Lloyd. That Sense of Constant Readjustment: Elizabeth Bishop “North & South.” New York: Garland, 1987.

Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.

Travisano, Thomas J. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.

Wylie, Diana E. Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Nemerov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.