In the Waiting Room (Leaving Cert English): Revision Notes

In the Waiting Room

Overview and introduction

Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" presents a powerful exploration of growing up and the sometimes frightening process of discovering one's place in the adult world. The poem focuses on a young girl's experience in a dentist's waiting room, where she encounters disturbing images in a magazine that force her to confront uncomfortable truths about adulthood and her own developing identity.

Bishop creates a compelling narrative poem that tells the story of a specific, life-changing moment. The atmosphere she establishes is one of anxiety, fear, and mounting tension. Through her skilled use of vivid details, readers can feel the same sense of shock and bewilderment that the young speaker experiences as she looks through the National Geographic magazine.

Bishop maintains a clear and controlled tone throughout the poem, even as her young protagonist goes through intense emotional turmoil. She deliberately controls the reading pace through her use of line breaks and enjambment, drawing readers deeper into the experience.

The poem's opening and setting

The poem begins by establishing a specific time and place: "In Worcester, Massachusetts," where a young girl accompanies her Aunt Consuelo to a dental appointment. The opening creates an ordinary, everyday scene that will soon become extraordinary through the girl's revelations.

The initial lines present a simple scenario - the girl waits while her aunt has dental work done. Bishop includes realistic details like the winter setting and early darkness, which add a sense of foreboding to what might otherwise seem like a routine visit. The waiting room is filled with typical elements: "grown-up people, / arctics and overcoats, / lamps and magazines." These mundane objects become significant as the poem progresses.

Summary of events

The poem takes readers through a series of events that dramatically change the young girl's understanding of herself and the world around her. While waiting for her aunt's appointment to finish, the girl becomes bored and begins reading a National Geographic magazine.

Initially, the magazine seems harmless enough, but it contains disturbing images that deeply unsettle the girl. She encounters photographs of volcanic eruptions - "the inside of a volcano, / black, and full of ashes; / then it was spilling over / in rivulets of fire." More troubling are the images of women from other cultures, particularly those showing "naked women with necks/wound round and round with wire" and other distressing content.

The girl describes the women's breasts as "horrifying," revealing her innocence and shock at these adult realities. Despite feeling disturbed, she finds herself unable to stop reading and looking at the images. This moment marks her first real confrontation with the adult world and its complexities.

The experience triggers a profound identity crisis. She becomes overwhelmed by the realisation that she shares a connection not only with her aunt in the next room but with all the adults around her. This recognition leads to an intense emotional reaction where she feels as though she's "sliding beneath black waves" of understanding and fear - waves that represent both her dread of growing up and her inability to escape that inevitable process.

Structure and form

"In the Waiting Room" is a ninety-nine-line poem written in free verse, meaning Bishop chose not to follow a traditional rhyme scheme or regular metrical pattern. This structural choice allows the poem to flow more naturally, mimicking the way memories and thoughts actually occur.

The poem divides into five stanzas of varying lengths:

• First stanza: 35 lines
• Second stanza: 18 lines
• Third stanza: 36 lines
• Fourth stanza: 4 lines
• Fifth stanza: 6 lines

These uneven stanza lengths reflect the irregular, unpredictable nature of the girl's emotional journey and the way traumatic realisations can come in waves of different intensities.

Poetic techniques and literary devices

Bishop employs several important poetic techniques throughout "In the Waiting Room" that enhance both its meaning and its emotional impact.

Simile appears prominently in the poem, particularly when describing the disturbing magazine images. For example, Bishop writes about "naked women with necks/wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs." This comparison helps readers visualise the strange and unsettling nature of what the girl sees while also suggesting something artificial or manufactured about these cultural practices that the young American girl cannot understand.

Alliteration creates emphasis and rhythm in several places. Lines fourteen and fifteen of the second stanza demonstrate this technique with "foolish," "falling," and "falling." This repetition of the 'f' sound reinforces the sense of things collapsing or coming apart, which mirrors the girl's emotional state.

Enjambment proves crucial to the poem's effect. This technique occurs when lines break before their natural stopping points, forcing readers to continue to the next line to complete thoughts or phrases. Bishop uses this extensively, creating a sense of urgency and keeping readers moving forwards, much like the girl's unstoppable journey towards greater awareness.

Detailed analysis by sections

First stanza - Lines 1-35

The opening section establishes the scene and begins building tension. The speaker recalls going with Aunt Consuelo to her dentist's appointment and waiting in the office. Bishop weaves longer descriptive lines with shorter, more abrupt ones, creating a rhythm that reflects both the mundane nature of waiting and the underlying anticipation of something significant about to happen.

The detail that "It was winter. It got dark early" adds an ominous tone and foreshadows the emotional darkness the young speaker will soon experience. In the waiting room, surrounded by "grown-up people," lamps, and everyday objects, the speaker turns to the only source of interest available: the magazine collection.

The girl mentions reading the National Geographic, and Bishop includes a charming parenthetical aside: "(I could read)" - acknowledging what readers might wonder about a young child's literacy while also showing the girl's pride in this accomplishment.

She describes looking at photographs of volcanic eruptions in vivid detail. The volcano imagery proves significant because it represents violent natural forces and destruction - themes that will parallel the emotional eruption the girl is about to experience.

Second stanza - Lines 1-18

This section marks the emotional turning point of the poem. The girl encounters an image of "A dead man slung on a pole" with the caption "Long Pig," immediately making readers aware of disturbing content that might include references to cannibalism or other violent practices.

She also describes seeing the date on the magazine cover - "the yellow margins, the date" - which will later be revealed as February, 1918. This detail becomes important for understanding the broader historical context of the poem.

The speaker describes her reaction to seeing the images of women, calling their breasts "horrifying." Despite her shock and distress, she cannot stop herself from continuing to read. This compulsive continuation shows how the transition from innocence to awareness often happens without our conscious choice - once we begin to see adult realities, we cannot unsee them.

Second full stanza - The aunt's cry

The poem's crisis moment arrives when the girl thinks she hears her aunt's voice from inside the dental office - "an oh! of pain" - but then realises the sound came from herself. This moment represents a crucial psychological breakthrough: she recognises that she and her aunt are connected, that they share experiences and vulnerabilities.

The use of consonance in the final lines of this section, with the repetition of the "l" sound, creates an effect that mimics the speaker's confused understanding of what's happening around her. The repetition emphasises her mental state as she begins "falling, falling" into a new awareness.

The girl becomes so overwhelmed by her realisation that she starts using the plural pronoun "we" instead of "I," showing how she now sees herself as connected to all the adults around her, including her aunt.

Third stanza - Identity crisis

In this crucial section, the girl attempts to ground herself by remembering basic facts: "I said to myself: three days / and you'll be seven years old." She tries to use her approaching birthday as an anchor, reminding herself that she's still just a child and not yet part of the adult world she's glimpsing.

However, this self-reassurance fails. The imagery in the National Geographic magazine and her own reaction to it have fundamentally altered her consciousness. She's been thrust into an understanding that she will one day become "one of them" - she'll grow up and become a woman like those she saw in the magazine.

The poem reveals that the speaker has been Elizabeth Bishop herself as a child throughout this experience. Her developing consciousness forces her to recognise that one day she will inevitably join the adult world, with all its complexities and disturbing realities.

Fourth stanza - Physical and emotional impact

This remarkably brief stanza of only four lines shows how the girl's emotional crisis begins affecting her physically. The waiting room becomes "bright / and too hot" and she experiences the sensation of "sliding beneath black waves" of understanding and fear.

Fifth stanza - Return to reality

The final stanza brings the speaker back to the present moment and the concrete details of her situation. "Then I was back in it" - she surfaces from her emotional crisis and returns to awareness of her immediate surroundings.

She notes that "The War was on. Outside" and confirms the date as "still the fifth / of February, 1918." This historical reference places the poem during World War I, adding another layer to the themes of violence and loss of innocence that permeate the work.

Major themes

Individual identity versus the other

One of the poem's central concerns involves the girl's struggle to understand both her individual identity and her place within the larger human community. Initially, like most children, she sees herself as separate and unique. The adults in the waiting room are simply "grown-up people" distinguished primarily by their clothing and accessories rather than their individual personalities or experiences.

However, as she reads the National Geographic and encounters images of people from different cultures, she begins to understand that she's part of a larger collective. The poem includes her internal questioning: "But I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them. / Why should you be one, too?"

This realisation creates deep anxiety because she must grapple with being both a unique individual and part of the collective whole. She discovers that she shares fundamental similarities with all humans - "boots, hands, the family voice" and experiences like pain - even with those whom her society might consider "Other," such as the indigenous peoples shown in the magazine.

Loss of innocence and growing up

The poem powerfully examines how children lose their innocence when they're exposed to adult realities. At the beginning, the speaker stands apart from the adults in the waiting room because of her youth and naivety. As the poem progresses, she rapidly loses that protective innocence when confronted with images of violence, cultural practices she doesn't understand, and adult sexuality.

Initially, the speaker describes her loss of innocence as something strange and unprecedented: "I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen." Her childhood understanding of the world gets completely replaced by a more complex, adult perspective.

The poem suggests that growing up often involves confronting uncomfortable truths about violence, sexuality, cultural difference, and mortality. The magazine images force the girl to acknowledge realities that her sheltered childhood had previously protected her from experiencing.

Historical and cultural context

"In the Waiting Room" gains additional depth when considered within its historical context. The poem examines themes of innocence, ageing, humanity, and identity, but the final stanza's revelation that "The War was on" shifts the meaning significantly.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 and lived until 1979, meaning her country and the world experienced almost constant warfare throughout her lifetime. The specific reference to February 1918 places this childhood memory during World War I, but Bishop wrote the poem during the 1970s, after experiencing two world wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.

The war context helps explain why the National Geographic magazine contained such disturbing images of violence and cultural otherness. During wartime, collective and individual identity become defined by nationality and which "side" people support in the conflict. War creates categories of "us" versus "them," turning people from other countries into potential enemies who must be defeated.

The speaker's fear of growing up becomes more understandable within this context. Becoming an adult during wartime means potentially becoming complicit in violence, experiencing loss, and having to choose sides in conflicts. War causes loss of innocence for everyone who experiences it, as it positions people from different countries as Others and enemies rather than fellow humans.