In the Waiting Room Essay Questions

Discuss Bishop's use of varied stanza length in this work.

"In the Waiting Room" is in large part a description of someone swinging between the mundane and the profound, with the speaker plunging into fear and doubt before attempting to extricate herself from it and return to normalcy. Elizabeth Bishop varies the length of the work's stanzas to reflect these emotional contrasts. The poem's early stanzas are long, reflecting the speaker's inexorable shift from a normal state to an extreme one prompted by the reading of a magazine. As the speaker succumbs to these extreme feelings, finding it difficult to maintain a cohesive train of thought, the poem's stanzas grow very short. These short stanzas reflect her sheer exhaustion following her plunge into existential panic.

What is the symbolic significance of breasts in this poem?

The speaker's greatest horror is reserved for a photograph of naked women, and specifically of their exposed breasts. On the one hand, these are the bodies of "black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire"—thus racial, cultural, and geographic differences make these women entirely new and unfamiliar to the speaker, inducing trepidation. At the same time, the speaker seems to experience an even deeper and more horrifying feeling of familiarity and sameness at the sight of these women. In her mind, the breasts are grouped with the sound of her aunt's cry, which, in turn, reminds her of her own voice. In general, all of the trappings of adult femininity serve to remind the speaker of her own inevitable arrival at womanhood.