Elizabeth Bishop “In the Waiting Room”

1. When you listen to Elizabeth Bishop’s reading of the poem you can feel that she is
describing her most intimate feelings to the reader with a tone of voice which transmit
a sense of closeness, as if she were next to that person.
The poem is written in free verse without any rhyme so that increases that feeling of
nearness because it feels like a story that anyone can tell to a friend.
2. Bishop tells through this poem a personal and intimate moment in which she has
accompanied her aunt to the dentist and starts making herself some questions and
reflections about her identity as a woman while she is looking at some pictures from
magazines in the dentist’s waiting room.
3. The metaphor of the volcano appears several times in the poem so that can make the
readers rethink if there is only one meaning to take into account. When we think
about a volcano spilling fire the most common is to relate that image to a sexual
context evoking the passion and climax of one’s sexuality, and that can be probably
one of the main uses Bishop makes. Nevertheless, if you keep reading carefully,
different interpretations can arise of the same thing. Therefore it is easy to relate that
image of volcano with chaos and confusion. This explains perfectly the mix of feelings
that she is getting through when she is thinking about all the references of women she
has around her.
4. When talking about the characters of the image Bishop’s looking at, she doesn’t make
it clear if she is watching people from different genders because she describes their
attire with clothes that are usually attributed to men but are also available to women.
The same goes for the names.
5. The image of “a dead man slung on a pole” sounds like some kind of common ritual of
tribes from other cultures. It is clear that visualization can’t give a pleasant sensation
which make us think that she is trying to explain through that scene the idea that any
feeling that moves away from heterosexuality will develop a feeling of rejection
according to Adrienne Rich’s term “compulsory heterosexuality”.
6. Maternity is also an important issue to be addressed in the poem. Bishop treats this
theme using pictures that lack visual beauty and convey a sense of rejection towards
being a mother. It feels as if she doesn’t feel sure about that part of women sexuality
and she questions herself why she should be like them.
7. In the part of the poem when she tells that her aunt is claiming the pain she is feeling
through an “oh” we can translate it as a pause in the speech she is making as if she is
trying to make a contrast between what she has just told until that moment and what
is coming next. It can also be seen as a reminder of the scenery where she is making
the interior monologue.
8. In the phrase “she was a foolish, timid woman” the stress falls on the word she, this
can be intentionally made by the author in order to emphasize who she is talking
about and to make the difference between she and her aunt.
9. No many lines after what was said above she changes the vision and mix her identity
with her aunt’s when she claims the phrase “I was my foolish aunt”, which can be seen
as a contradiction. This is just another instance more of that feeling of confusion. If we
relate this last statement with others from the past lines when she was talking about
maternity and sexuality, we could clarify all the chaos living inside Bishop’s mind with
the simple idea that she doesn’t want to be like her aunt and she is afraid of the idea
to end just like her.