"In the Waiting Room" is a poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, written in 1976. This makes it one of Bishop's later works, written not long before her death in 1979. The poem is written from the point of view of a girl of six, accompanying her aunt to the dentist's office. This speaker is named Elizabeth, and the poem is set in Bishop's own hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, suggesting that the work is autobiographical.
In the dentist's waiting room, the speaker experiences a moment of sudden alienation, fear, and defamiliarization from the world, prompted both by the sound of her aunt crying out in pain and by her own perusal of an issue of National Geographic magazine. Through the simultaneous apprehension of both the deeply familiar and the foreign, the speaker comes to reckon with the scope of the world, of her family, and of her own identity as she never has before.
The work is written in free verse, with five stanzas that vary widely in length. Much of its momentum comes from the juxtaposition of unlike images, in particular those drawn from the pages of the magazine the speaker reads. Through juxtaposition, Bishop creates an echo of her speaker's own emotional, sensory, and intellectual overload. Tonally, this poem is largely conversational—panicked at points, but at other times, with greater narrative distance, calm, meditative, and analytical.
