Breasts (Symbol)
Of all the images the speaker sees in National Geographic, one in particular horrifies her: that of the "awful hanging breasts" of naked women. The novelty and unfamiliarity of these images may be part of what upsets the speaker, especially since the women in the photographs are black and the speaker is (presumably) white. But her distress also appears to be tinged with concern about her impending adulthood. The speaker's horror at the naked women coincides with her horrified realization that she and her aunt speak in the same voice, and that she is inevitably fated to become like her aunt and like the adult women around her. The sight of these naked adult women, then, serves as a concrete reminder of the speaker's inevitable transition to adulthood, and to womanhood in particular.
The Date (Symbol)
As the speaker begins to panic, experiencing a moment of existential unmooring, she refers to the cover of the magazine in her hand and looks at "the yellow margins, the date." Again at the end of the poem, with her mood returning to its normal state, the speaker notes that it is "still the fifth / of February, 1918." In this poem, the date is a symbol of culturally mediated organizational systems used to keep an overwhelming, unintelligible reality at bay. When the speaker tries to make sense of her world head-on, without any kind of external system to order it, she feels entirely helpless. Through her magazine, she comes face-to-face with countless unfamiliar cultures and places, juxtaposed bewilderingly. The date offers a tool for sorting through these otherwise meaningless sensations, and for making sense of them within a familiar cultural context.
