Death
As the poem's title suggests, this work is engaged with the mysteries of death: in this case, because the person who has died is a young child, it is especially engaged with questions of unjust and premature death. In particular, Bishop is curious about the ways that the living and the dead continue to interact and share experiences of a sort. The poem's speaker interacts with her cousin via mourning rituals, attending his wake, viewing his body, and laying a symbolic flower in his hand. This is paralleled by the figure of the taxidermied loon. Though dead, the loon continues to survey the room, playing a role in the human lives that take place there—though this role is determined by the choices of the still-living people who have shot, stuffed, and kept the loon. In many ways, the dead in this poem, whether human or animal, operate in a parallel role to the framed pictures of royals on the wall. Though the speaker's family does not know the royals, their faces and the idea of the royal family have emotional significance to the family. Similarly, though the dead can no longer be family members or active agents, their memories, their remains, and the ceremonies that surround mourning continue to have significance for the family.
Childhood
The speaker's first encounter with death takes place against a backdrop of as-yet untarnished childhood innocence. Thus the poem contains an unnerving, dreamlike convergence of two usually separate realms: the whimsical, imaginative imagery of childhood on the one hand, and stark depictions of death on the other. Unexpectedly, though, Bishop does not necessarily depict the awareness of death as a shock that dismantles or destroys the child's innocence. Instead, the speaker employs her juvenile knowledge of the world around her to comprehend death, making use of the few pieces of knowledge she has at her disposal in order to understand what has happened to her cousin. For instance, she understands her cousin's paleness through the lens of Jack Frost, a figure of children's folklore, and she imagines that her cousin is soon to become a member of the royal family. Though in some ways these forms of explanation are inadequate and unsatisfying, they are also oddly astute in other ways. Arthur must now be understood through ritual, retelling, and memory, just like a member of the royal family or a folktale character. Even in the act of narrating the poem, the speaker continues to contextualize him in this way, retelling the story of his death and reimagining the narrative surrounding him.
