"First Death in Nova Scotia" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop. First appearing in The New Yorker in 1962, and then in the 1965 collection Questions of Travel, this work explores themes of death and childhood through the perspective of a young child attending a wake. The naive speaker, encountering death for the first time, examines her cousin's body and lays a flower in his hand. Throughout, she displays a blend of worry and detached curiosity, attempting to understand death using the information and understanding of the world that she has at her disposal.
The poem takes place in the early-twentieth-century Canadian landscape in which Bishop herself was raised. As a result, it draws on imagery taken from the culture and geography of that time and place—from the British royal family to the folkloric figure of Jack Frost to the birds and animals of the region. Through these familiar sights and ideas, the speaker attempts to piece together a narrative of her cousin's death.
This work is composed of five stanzas, each containing ten lines. It lacks a uniform meter and rhyme scheme, but contains a subtly persistent use of both rhyme and rhythm: each line includes three stressed syllables regardless of total length, and each stanza contains a variety of rhyme types. Its diction is simple and straightforward, as well as somewhat repetitive, reflecting the limited expressive capabilities of the young speaker. At the same time, Bishop uses a great deal of figurative language to illuminate the way that her speaker searches for connections and associations in the bewildering world around her.
