Summary
The photographs of royals in the family's parlor show them warmly wrapped in red clothes made of ermine, with the trails of their robes covering the women's feet. The speaker imagines that they have asked Arthur to come join them at the court, where he will be the smallest page there. But the speaker worries about how Arthur, holding his flower with his eyes closed, will traverse the snow-covered roads to reach them.
Analysis
Throughout the poem, Bishop has characterized Arthur's body as small and delicate. She has noted that it is pale and small, and compared it to delicate objects like a frosted cake or a doll. However, these descriptions, while evoking childhood, have not particularly evoked vulnerability or incited pity. Instead, they seem to unify Arthur and the speaker in a childlike, fanciful world. This shifts in the poem's final stanza. Here, Bishop chooses to use literal rather than figurative language, and describes Arthur in terms of his vulnerability. The verbs "clutched" and "clenching" suggest desperation and fear, while the adjective "tiny"—though technically applied to the flower rather than Arthur—emphasizes his vulnerability and smallness. Finally, though the speaker indulges in a fantasy about her cousin joining the royal court, the fantasy is disrupted by the incursion of logistical problems: the roads are snowy, and Arthur, in his vulnerability, may be unable to cross them. Previously, the speaker had seemed to identify with Arthur. Now, she instead seems to take note of the way that death has separated them, making him lonely and pitiable. She experiences alarm on his behalf, wondering what his experience of death is like.
The snow on the roads is presented as an obstacle to Arthur, and is one instance of the way that cold, as a motif, runs through the poem. The work opens with the speaker observing that the parlor itself is very cold, which both literally helps immerse the reader in the atmosphere of a Canadian winter, and hints at the presence of death in the room. The speaker imagines that the loon stands on a frozen lake, and even observes that her cousin's coffin looks like a "frosted cake," with the word "frosted" carrying a second meaning associated with cold. Arthur is compared to an autumn leaf, and the figure of Jack Frost is associated with winter and ice. Cold is, here, the sensory condition most linked with death. Only one mention of warmth is made—that of the royal family dressed warmly in fur—but Arthur is prevented from seeking refuge with the royal family, in the speaker's mind, precisely because of the cold, snow, and ice outside.
