In the Waiting Room Literary Elements

The speaker is a woman recalling her experiences as a young girl in 1918. Named Elizabeth, she is implied to be an autobiographical depiction of the poet herself.

Five stanzas of varying length in free verse

Bishop uses little metaphor and simile in this poem. The work does describe "black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs," a simile, as well as the metaphor "our eyes glued to the cover." Its most prominent simile, however, is "the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world."

Phrases with alliteration include "while I waited I read," "wound round and round with wire," "not very loud or long," "lying under the lamps," and "big black wave." Assonance is rarely used in this poem, but it appears in the phrases "black, and full of ashes;" and "still the fifth."

The poem's premise is unexpected and situationally ironic—the speaker experiences a profound moment of disorientation, disconnection from selfhood, and awareness of the world's strangeness while sitting in the mundane space of a dentist's waiting room. Moreover, the differences between the poem's adult speaker and the childhood self she remembers produce a lightly ironic distance.

Lyric poem

Worcester, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1918

Meditative, thoughtful, panicked, inquisitive

The protagonist is the young speaker. The antagonist is abstract—her sense of the inevitability of her identity and the strangeness of reality

The poem's major conflict is the speaker's attempt to come to grips with the existential panic that overtakes her in the waiting room.

The climax is the moment at which the speaker feels fully overwhelmed by her feelings, so that the room seems to be enveloped by black waves.

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The statement "I scarcely dared to look" understatedly describes the speaker's fear, placing it in negative terms.

The poem's central allusion is to the magazine "National Geographic." It also alludes to the couple Osa and Martin Johnson, known as adventurers and photographers.

The description of "shadowy gray knees, / trousers and skirts and boots/and different pairs of hands" uses synecdoche, describing a group of people by referring to discrete parts of them.

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The statement "I knew that nothing stranger / had ever happened, that nothing / stranger could ever happen," uses hyperbole to demonstrate the speaker's strong feelings of shock.

Aunt Consuelo's cry is described onomatopoetically as an "oh!"