Summary
The speaker has accompanied her aunt to a dentist's appointment in Worcester, Massachusetts. She sits in the waiting room, surrounded by adults in winter clothes—it is winter outside and growing dark early. While her aunt is in the dentist's office, she reads an issue of National Geographic magazine. She examines the photographs, which show her a range of strange things. First an erupting volcano, and then Osa and Martin Johnson, a couple known for photographing remote places, wearing safari gear. Then a man's corpse suspended from a pole with the caption "long pig." Next, she sees pictures of babies whose heads are pointed, wrapped in coils of string, and of naked black women who have wires coiled around their necks so that they look to the speaker like lightbulbs. The speaker finds the women's breasts distressing but nevertheless reads the entire magazine, feeling too self-conscious not to. The speaker examines the outside of the magazine, with the date printed on the cover. Then she hears someone call out in pain from within the dentist's office. She recognizes the cry as her aunt's, which isn't surprising to her, because her aunt is a foolish person. She isn't embarrassed by her aunt, but she does feel surprised by how much the cry sounds like her own voice. She feels that the cry is coming out of her body, and that she and her aunt are falling together with their eyes fixed on the cover of National Geographic magazine from February of 1918.
In order to stop the dizzying feeling that she is falling off the edge of the world, the speaker reminds herself that she will be turning seven years old in a few days. She mulls over the fact that she is an individual human among other humans‚ "an I," as she puts it—and wonders why this is. She is afraid to look at the people around her, who serve as examples of what she, too, is. Because she is small she can see only their legs and their hands resting in their laps as they sit in the waiting room. She feels that nothing so strange ever has happened or will happen.
Analysis
Throughout this work, Elizabeth Bishop veers between orienting and disorienting her reader, in order to convey the strange feelings that her speaker is navigating. For the speaker, a series of seemingly unrelated external cues—National Geographic with its photographs of faraway places and unfamiliar people, Aunt Consuelo's cry, and the speaker's own inevitable growing-up—converge to prompt an unfamiliar, out-of-body sensation. The foreignness of the adult world, and the foreignness of the photographs in the magazine, only serve to make the speaker feel foreign to herself. Her very existence seems arbitrary to her, to a degree that is frightening and yet absurd.
Bishop helps place readers in this disoriented, dizzying mindset through juxtaposition, both in terms of imagery and tone. The poem regularly references certain spatial, temporal, and kinship systems that people use to orient themselves in the wider world: dates, city names, seasons, family names, and family roles. In the first few lines of the poem, Bishop helps fix us in time, place, and situation with the phrases "Worcester, Massachusetts," "Aunt Consuelo," "dentist's waiting room," "winter," and "early." Even the poem's title offers grounding in a prosaic, easily understood setting. These are basic exposition, but they also reveal something about the child speaker: she clings to these clear systems and labels in order to navigate a terrifying world.
For a while, subsequently, the poem departs from these stabilizing markers and veers off into the unknown with a series of rapidly juxtaposed visuals—quick, almost hallucinatory flashes rather than fully fleshed-out images—as the speaker describes the magazine photographs before her. These are dramatic and even disturbing images, depicting violence and danger, although the speaker is most distressed by an image of naked women. This in turn suggests that, for the speaker, the inevitability of growing up and of womanhood is distressing. Indeed, her next horrified realization, as she hears her aunt cry out in the only aural image of the poem, is that she is inextricable from her aunt. The realization that she will join the ranks of the adult world and of women, and indeed that she is a person at all, prompts the speaker to feel that she is losing her comfortable grip on reality.
Several times in this first stanza, including at its conclusion, the speaker seeks a return to those familiar markers of time and space. As her grasp on reality begins to waver (or, in a sense to deepen) the speaker examines the cover of the magazine she is reading. Even though the images within have shocked her, the cover offers a steadying tool in the form of a date: 1918. She continues to seek out these stabilizing signals in the second stanza, reminding herself of her age and her name—Elizabeth. These are aimed at situating her within a wider comprehensible universe, but despite the speaker's best attempts, that comprehensible universe continues to falter.
These shifts between stable and destabilized worldviews also reflect a split within the identity of the speaker herself. Though she narrates a childhood experience, she does so at a remove. As readers, we know that Elizabeth Bishop wrote this poem long after the events described, in the later years of her career. But external and biographical information aren't necessary to see this. The poem contains a lightly ironic distance from the childhood version of the speaker, expressed in distancing generalizations like "I was too shy to stop." Thus, we don't merely shift between two moods in this poem. We also shift, more subtly, between two points of view, as the speaker immerses herself in her memories and then seeks to explain and understand those memories from an adult perspective.
