Below them on the table
stood a stuffed loon
shot and stuffed by Uncle
Arthur, Arthur's father.
The poem opens with a description of an interconnected landscape, an ecosystem of sorts, laid out in the speaker's family parlor. Each object in this ecosystem is linked in a complex set of causal, familial, and spatial relationships. Thus the speaker's cousin's body coexists alongside photographs of the royal family, as well as with a stuffed bird. The bird watches over the dead, even as he himself is one of them. The bird also shares a relationship with the speaker's uncle, since it is the uncle who killed it. At the same time, the uncle has his own relationship to Arthur, his son. The speaker reports on all of these relationships as equally important and relevant. Rather than viewing her cousin's body as existing in contrast to the mundane furnishings of the room, she sees the room itself as imbued with mystery and intrigue, and Arthur's body as one element of it.
Arthur's coffin was
a little frosted cake,
and the red-eyed loon eyed it
from his white, frozen lake.
Bishop chooses to mix metaphors here, with her speaker comparing the coffin to a cake and the table on which the stuffed bird rests to a lake. This creates a jarring set of contrasts, both because these two images come from different settings and evoke different associations, and because Bishop is also playing with scale. By imagining the coffin as a cake and the table as a lake—the latter much larger than the former—Bishop crafts a hallucinatory mood, in which the normal boundaries between realms come crashing down. This gives insight into the speaker's worldview, which doesn't yet seem to comprehend the barriers between these images. The speaker experiences life impressionistically, without imposing prescription or judgment, and without remarking upon the strange or unusual. Not only can the cake and the lake coexist, in the same space and on the same scale, but they can also both exist in harmony with the presence of death.
Arthur was very small.
He was all white, like a doll
that hadn't been painted yet.
This poem does not follow a consistent rhyme scheme, but Bishop makes frequent use of end rhyme in the work. In this passage, taken from the opening of the fourth stanza, two lines rhyme with one another and are followed by a third, non-rhyming line. This choice is a reflection of the speaker's emotions and perceptions in the moment. At first, the speaker tries to link the sight of her cousin's body to something comforting and familiar that fits into her childlike world—a doll. Through the rhyming of "small" and "doll," she connects the concepts of Arthur and the doll, with the rhyme revealing a certain harmoniousness and ease to her thinking. However, the third line, in which the speaker notes that her cousin looks unpainted because he is pale and lifeless, represents a shift to a more unsettled way of thinking—by noting that he looks unpainted, the speaker picks up on a way in which he cannot be neatly slotted in with the familiar objects and routines of her life. The choice not to rhyme this line with the surrounding ones suggests that this particular observation cannot be reconciled with the speaker's existing explanations and frameworks.
But how could Arthur go,
clutching his tiny lily,
with his eyes shut up so tight
and the roads deep in snow?
Previously, the speaker has primarily spoken about her cousin as an object or toy, linking him metaphorically to dolls and leaves. In doing so, she separates him from his subjectivity, neglecting to imagine her cousin's experience. In the final moments of the poem, she imagines him in a more active role—that of a royal page. This is still fanciful and cheerful, but it prompts the speaker to think about her cousin's own subjective experience. This, in turn, creates a moment of fear and grief that we have not yet seen in the work. For the first time, the speaker wonders what it is like, not merely to be in the presence of a dead person, but to be dead. Her questioning remains childlike. For instance, she wonders how he will join the royal family when the roads are icy. Still, the moment contains a flash of empathy, sadness, and fright not visible elsewhere in the poem.
