Summary
The speaker's mother lifts her up, telling her to say her goodbyes to her cousin Arthur, and helping her to place a lily-of-the-valley flower in his hand. Arthur's coffin reminds the speaker of a frosted cake, while beside it, the loon watches from the lake-like table. The speaker observes that Arthur looks very small, like a doll that has been left partially painted. He looks as if Jack Frost has begun to paint him, just as he always paints maple leaves (Jack Frost is a folk character said to leave frost on windows and paint leaves red in the fall). Jack Frost seems to have painted Arthur's hair, but then dropped his brush and left the rest of him permanently white.
Analysis
This poem's speaker is young enough that she does not yet have a narrative or framework for dealing with death. In this poem, however, we receive glimpses into the way that adults deal with the presence of death, transmuting it into something that can be controlled, examined, and shared among a community or family. This is done through symbol and ritual. The poem takes place at a wake, in which a community gathers together to say farewells to the dead. The speaker's mother, meanwhile, prompts her to put a lily of the valley in her cousin's hand. This flower symbolizes purity and innocence, in this case referencing Arthur's young age. At the same time, they are often used at funerals and are associated with mourning, so here, they help contextualize the family's grief within a broader communal and social routine surrounding death. The speaker does not yet have access to precisely the same kinds of communal rituals that adults do—she attends the wake and gives Arthur lily-of-the-valley, but doesn't yet know how to find comfort in these routines. However, she does seek to contextualize Arthur's death in other familiar rituals and routines, ones more familiar to a child. Through figurative language, she understands his body as, in turn, a doll and a cake—two objects that are both comprehensible and comforting for her, though they might seem incongruous with a funeral scene. She also links his paleness to the actions of Jack Frost, using the folklore of children to place her cousin's death within a known narrative. The figure of Jack Frost, meanwhile, is used to explain the workings of nature itself, with its uncontrollable seasonal changes. Here, the speaker merely elaborates the uses of this character, applying this piece of folklore to another mystery of nature—the split between life and death.
Bishop does not use an entirely regular meter and rhyme scheme, nor does she opt for completely free verse. Instead, she chooses a pattern in which every line contains three stressed syllables. This variable trimeter is accompanied by frequent, but irregular, rhyme. In stanza three, for instance, Bishop uses slant rhyme to link lines 1 and 3, which end with the words "mother" and "Arthur." Rhyme also connects line 8 to line 10, the final line: these end with, respectively, the words "cake" and "lake" (in fact, regardless of where else the rhyme in a given stanza falls, Bishop always links the final line to one other line with rhyme, whether a slant rhyme or a true one). Thus both rhyme and meter appear as partial patterns—as if the speaker is struggling, haltingly, to impose order on her current experience.
