and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
The seemingly throwaway comment "(I could read)" offers a hint at the age of the speaker, letting us know that she is likely a young child. It also suggests that she is just on the verge of a more adult awareness of the world, able to comprehend more than she previously could through the skill of reading. The simple syntax of these lines and the repetition of the pronoun "I," meanwhile, have a grounding effect. The speaker's identity and perceptions come across as stable and straightforward. Only as the poem continues will the very issue of her being "an I" be called into question.
What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
As the speaker overhears her aunt calling out in pain from the dentist's office, she confronts the visceral, uncomfortable fact that she is similar to her "foolish" aunt. Their relationship, though, goes beyond mere resemblance. To the speaker, it feels as if the separation between herself and her aunt has melted away, or else that it was perhaps always artificial and imagined. Their very bodies seem to function as a single body, with a single voice emerging from a single mouth. This is in spite of the fact that the speaker does not especially like or respect her aunt. The speaker feels that her fate and identity lie outside of her control, and indeed that her individuality is a mere illusion.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
Even as the speaker attempts in this stanza to reorient herself by observing her everyday, familiar surroundings, she is prevented from doing so. Because she is a child, her surroundings exist on a scale inhospitable to her, so that when she gazes around at eye level she sees only the lower bodies of the dentists' other patients. Her growing awareness of the adult world collides, in other words, with the frightening experience of childhood in a world created for adults. With this passage, Bishop makes the poem's unremarkable-seeming setting suddenly strange, and problematizes the ideal of childhood as a happy, straightforward period of life.
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
In this section of the poem, the speaker is confronted by a question so enormous and so fundamental that she struggles to voice it. Her question concerns the nature of reality itself—why, she thinks, should anything be as it is? Why, indeed, should anything exist at all? Bishop demonstrates the speaker's inability to satisfyingly voice this by allowing her language to fray. The repetition of the word "how," serves this purpose, as does the use of ellipses and caesura. Quotation marks around the word "unlikely" use the poem's doubled first-person perspective—the speaker retrospectively inhabiting the world of her younger self—to evoke the speaker's frustration as she attempts, with the vocabulary of a child, to give voice to her complex thoughts.
