Elizabeth
The poem's speaker, who identifies herself as Elizabeth (and can therefore be understood as an autobiographical rendering of the poet herself) is a girl of almost seven years old growing up in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts in the year 1918. Exposed at once to very familiar sights and sounds, in the form of her aunt's voice, and to wildly unfamiliar ones, in the form of images from National Geographic magazine, Elizabeth experiences a profound moment of disorientation and existential reckoning. She feels that it is bizarre that she is a human being at all, and that she is herself in particular. She feels alienated from herself, and at the same time aware of her fundamental similarity to every person around her. Eventually, the speaker returns to her normal mental state, becoming oriented again in the waiting room, in a specific city and year, but only after this formative experience of wonder.
Aunt Consuelo
Aunt Consuelo appears in the poem only in the form of a single cry of pain, which the speaker hears emerging from the dentist's office. Though the speaker finds her aunt to be foolish and somewhat ridiculous, she is nevertheless struck by their resemblance to one another, and by the way that her aunt's voice resembles her own. Despite her impatience with her aunt, she comes to understand that they are ultimately inextricable from one another. The speaker understands not merely her own lack of control over her fate—as she grows, she will come to resemble her aunt and others in her family—but also her own basic lack of individuality. The boundaries between people, including between the speaker and her aunt, seem arbitrary and strange.
