A Summary and Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘In the Waiting Room’ is one of the best-known poems by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79). Written in 1971 and published in the collection Geography III in 1976, the poem describes a visit to the dentist which the young Bishop made as a six-year-old girl.

As she waits for her aunt to undergo dental treatment, she sat in the waiting room outside and had a kind of epiphany about her place in the world. The poem, like many of Bishop’s, has its origins in the poet’s own childhood (Aunt Consuelo was, in reality, Bishop’s Aunt Florence), although we should be wary of reading the poem as straight autobiography.

Summary

The setting of the poem is a dentist’s waiting room in the town of Worcester in Massachusetts on 5 February 1918 (the closing lines of the poem give us the exact date). The time was afternoon, because it was getting dark outside and it gets dark early in the winter. The speaker of the poem, who was six years old (nearly seven) at the time, recalls sitting in the dentist’s waiting room while ‘Aunt Consuelo’ went into the dentist’s office for her appointment.

As she sat and waited for her aunt, the speaker looked around at the adults sitting in the waiting room before picking up a copy of the National Geographic magazine and reading it, although it’s the photographs which make the most impact on her. These included a volcano whose lava was spilling out; two explorers, Osa and Martin Johnson; a dead man on a pole about to be roasted by a cannibal tribe; babies with pointed heads; and naked black women with ‘horrifying’ breasts.

Her perusal of the magazine was interrupted by a cry from her aunt in the dentist’s office, which sounded exactly like the young speaker’s cry. She realised she is just like her aunt in many ways. Her seventh birthday was three days away, and she clung to this fact in an effort to keep herself grounded as her head spun from this new revelation concerning her similarity to her aunt.

She realised she is not just an individual but part of a group: as well as being ‘an I’, she is ‘an Elizabeth’ (like all other girls and women with that name), and ‘one of them’ (women?). She was almost too scared to look at herself and discover what she really is. Looking around again at the other people in the waiting room, she was struck by how strange everything felt all of a sudden.

The speaker began to wonder what makes anyone an individual when there are clearly lots of things which she has in common with other people, and especially other women. She began to think in a more metaphysical sense about life, and about how and why she came to be there, in America, in the waiting room with all of these other people (as opposed, presumably, to being in some other part of the world where the ‘black, naked women’ with the ‘horrifying’ breasts from the National Geographic are found).

The shock of this realisation, along with the uncomfortable heat of the waiting room, was enough to make the speaker faint. She recalls coming back to consciousness. She remembered where and when she was: it was 5 February 1918 and the First World War was being fought.

Analysis

‘In the Waiting Room’ – a poem which, like a number of Elizabeth Bishop poems, treads the line between being a personal lyric recounting an individual’s perspective and a narrative poem describing an event in that person’s life – has been interpreted through various critical lenses and from a number of different perspectives.

Should we focus on the gender of the speaker, and those ‘awful’ breasts she sees in the women in the National Geographic? Is this a poem about a young girl, specifically, realising she will one day become a woman? Will she be subject to – and seek to perpetuate through her observance and adherence – the patriarchal, sexist practices she observes in other cultures who encourage or force women to wind wire around their necks to enhance their attractiveness to men, and to mutilate their babies’ heads for a similar reason?

When the young Elizabeth comes back to consciousness at the end of the poem, she has also come to a new state of ‘consciousness’, or awareness, of her place in the world. She is both an individual and just like everyone else. She, like the women in the magazine, will soon grow ‘horrifying’ breasts as her body reaches maturity. But is it just her incipient knowledge of her female body-in-waiting, her potential to become a woman possessed of sexuality and potential to create new life (the breasts, the babies), that horrifies the young girl?

Perhaps. But then to view the poem solely from a gendered perspective might be to limit its power and range. For it is not just naked women whom the younger Elizabeth sees in the magazines: the man on the pole known as ‘Long Pig’, being readied for the spit, is presumably naked as well.

In other words, the poem is concerned with bodies in general, and body parts in particular: not just breasts but heads and necks, the knees and hands of the other patients sitting in the waiting room, and (indirectly, given the setting) teeth and mouths (Aunt Consuelo’s cry, and the realisation that her cry is just like young Elizabeth’s own: ‘my voice, in my mouth’).

That moment, when the girl hears her aunt’s cry from within the dentist’s office, is nicely ambiguous: when we first read those words, ‘suddenly, from inside’, we are primed to expect some inner response from the girl herself, given her introspection immediately prior to this moment: ‘from inside’ turns out to mean ‘from inside the office’, but for a moment it glimmers with the possibility that the cry has come from within the girl herself – which, in a sense, it has, as she realises to her shock.

She and her aunt are bound by more than genetics: the fact that the six-year-old girl identifies a similarity between her own girlish cry of pain and the sound made by her grown aunt also collapses any safe distinction between girl and woman, child and adult, and in doing so collapses the years between her innocent childhood and her adult years that she had imagined were still a whole lifetime away in her future.

Form

Although ‘In the Waiting Room’ is unrhymed, to call it ‘free verse’ would be an oversimplification. The fairly short, brisk lines – so apt for a poem recounting a child’s seemingly simple view of the world – gravitate towards iambic trimeter with a final hypermetrical stress, as in the first line: ‘In WOR-cester, MASS-a-CHU-setts’.

Although the stanzas are of uneven lengths, it is worth thinking about why Bishop chooses to end a stanza where she does. For example, the penultimate stanza breaks off just at the moment when the younger Bishop collapses and faints in the waiting room, with the blank line preceding the poem’s shorter final stanza echoing the blacking out of the girl’s consciousness.