Summary
The speaker starts to ask herself a series of existential questions concerning the nature of selfhood and identity. Why, she wonders, is any person themself? Why should she be her aunt, or herself, and why should she exist at all? She thinks about whether humans share anything at all, from clothes to bodies to the voice she shares with her aunt to the breasts in the National Geographic photo. She considers how strange it is (the word she uses, unable to find one that satisfies her more, is "unlikely") that she is where she is at this moment—in the waiting room, hearing her aunt's cry of pain. The room feels uncomfortably bright and hot, and the speaker feels as if enormous black waves are falling over it, one after the next. Then, suddenly, she feels reoriented in the world again. She remembers that the war is happening outside, that she is in Worcester, that it is dark and snowy outside, and that it is still February 5th, 1918.
Analysis
In these closing stanzas, the form of the poem begins to fracture, just as the speaker's understanding of reality and her place in it fractures. The long, breathless stanzas that made up the start of the work give way to increasingly short and jagged ones, as if the speaker is struggling to maintain a single line of thought—or, indeed, as if the speaker is simply exhausted. The work's third stanza consists almost entirely of rhetorical questions, as if the speaker is too overwhelmed to process her thoughts in any form but an interrogative one. Moreover, Bishop gives us a glimpse into her speaker's struggle to even express her thoughts, much less fully answer the questions that preoccupy her. "How--I didn't know any / word for it--how 'unlikely' . . ." the speaker muses in stanza three. Here, caesura—mid-line pauses, created here through hyphens—show us that the speaker is unable to smoothly put her feelings into words, and is forced to stop and seek out suitable ones. Eventually, she picks "unlikely," but only after stopping to clarify that even this word seems insufficient for the enormity of the existential concerns she seeks to explore.
In the poem's very brief fourth stanza, it seems as if the speaker has finally become completely helpless in the face of these unanswerable, inexpressible feelings. The world has become so strange to her that she can no longer interact with it normally. Black waves seem to obliterate the space around the speaker. The poem's language here is declarative and clear again, but that straightforward language does not describe a legible, safe reality. Instead, it describes a reality broken down into incomprehensibility. The poem's fifth stanza is formally very similar to the fourth—again, it uses simple declarative syntax and straightforward description, within the space of a single very short stanza. However, here Bishop returns to the stable and stabilizing imagery of the poem's beginning. The speaker notes again where she is in time and space, suddenly emerging from the swamp of disorientation in which she previously found herself. With these parallel and yet opposite final stanzas, Bishop suggests that her speaker is unable to occupy both mental spaces at once. She can either fully interrogate the strangeness of her own life and of the world around her, thereby succumbing to a kind of oblivion, or she can go on with her everyday life by putting aside that strangeness. At the same time, at the end of the poem the speaker seems to extricate herself somewhat from her immersion in memory. Statements like "The War was on" demonstrate a distanced, adult perspective beyond the relatively limited one of the speaker's seven-year-old self. Whereas the wider world as presented in National Geographic causes the child speaker to panic, as an adult she is able to calmly think and speak about frightening, globally impactful, difficult-to-comprehend events like a World War without losing her composure.
