First Death in Nova Scotia Essay Questions

What function is served by the portraits of royalty?

The room in which the wake takes place is decorated with portraits of the British royal family, which serve a number of purposes in the work. Most straightforwardly, they help create a sense of place, orienting readers in Canada (a British colony) during the early years of the twentieth century. Moreover, these photographs occupy a liminal space between the dead and the alive, since they are neither living presences nor dead—rather they are immobile, silent images. In a poem that explores the gap between the dead and the living, this liminality is an important rhetorical device, shedding light on the states of the dead and the living alike. For the young speaker, they indeed serve as a conduit between the living and the dead: she imagines that her cousin Arthur, following his death, will join the royal family.

How do the poem's meter and rhyme scheme elucidate the speaker's character?

Bishop makes use of an irregular, but not entirely unpatterned, rhyme scheme and meter. Each of the lines in this work contains three stressed syllables, though the total number of syllables and the specific stress pattern are not the same from line to line. Similarly, each stanza contains a number of rhymes—not merely end rhymes but slant rhymes and internal rhymes as well—with the final line of each stanza consistently rhyming with at least one earlier ending word in that stanza. Through these choices, Bishop gives the impression that her speaker is struggling to gain an understanding of her situation and to identify patterns and meanings in the world around her. She is working to comprehend her cousin's death, but she does not yet have access to a complete framework through which to see the events around her—similarly, her language is faltering, reaching for sound patterns but unable to entirely sustain them.