In Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Susan McCabe writes that Elizabeth Bishop’s life, particularly her childhood, ‘was characterised by traumatic loss and dislocation’ as a result of being ‘eight months old when her father died’ and her mother being ‘unable to successfully work through her grief’. Bishop later suffered a ‘tumultuous period’ after the death of Lota de Macedo Soares, her partner of fifteen years. McCabe claims that ‘writing (was) a way, not to overcome, but to come to terms with loss’, implying that Bishop turned to poetry to consolidate and make peace with her grievances. I agree with this statement; Geography III consists of two particular poems, ‘In the Waiting Room’ and ‘One Art’, both of which focus on different types of loss.
The tone of ‘In the Waiting Room’ is one of apprehension and anguish as an elderly Bishop returns to her youth, her anxiety a result of confronting the innocence she has lost and the adolescence she now knows is her future. In The Weirdest Scale on Earth: Elizabeth Bishop and Containment, Lee Zimmerman considers the poem, writing that ‘loss’ is the ‘threat that impels Bishop’s weird scale’. His criticism proposes that the risk of loss spurs Bishop’s uneven stanzas and lack of rhyme scheme, components that convey her uneasiness at the pictures. Bishop begins the poem with childlike observations, remarking that ‘it was winter. It got dark early’, her established setting foreboding the discomfort she experiences. She claims that ‘the waiting room was full of grown-up people’, innocently attempting to separate herself from the elders; this disconnection is made as Bishop is attempting to reclaim her girlhood, however, she maintains that she ‘(Bishop) could read)’ despite her youth. Bishop’s use of brackets notifies readers of her ability but simultaneously maintains that her capabilities don’t make her inevitable loss of innocence any less devastating. The imagery described in the magazine, like the setting, is also foreboding; ‘the inside of a volcano’ that is ‘full of ashes: then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire’ connotes imminent change. The plural noun ‘rivulet’ implies a steady stream of a liquid erupting from a once dormant fissure, similar to Bishop’s verbal reaction to the pictures she initially calmly ‘studied’.
Bishop’s foreboding, which anticipates her loss of innocence, reaches its pinnacle when she encounters ‘black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs’. Despite the violent imagery, in which Bishop’s use of enjambment emphasises the wire tightness and how thin these women’s necks must have appeared, the poet focuses on their chests, writing ‘their breasts were horrifying’. Bishop’s parataxis and adjective are to be noted; her stream of thought is abruptly cut off by image. Zimmerman writes that ‘this anxiety about maternal containment, indeed, is the ground note of the child's reading’. The ‘maternal containment’ he refers to implies the changes a woman’s body undergoes during both adolescence and pregnancy. These impending changes unsettle Bishop more than the strangulation these women are undergoing. Her parataxis continues, she writes that ‘(she) read it straight through. (She) was too shy to stop’. Her inability to stop reading entails her loss of innocence, she is too timid to stop enlightening herself to what is in front of her.
Bishop’s physical reaction to the photographs, that spur her understanding that she will lose her youth, emphasise the suddenness of her realisation and the harshness of the changes she will undergo. The pictures of the woman’s breasts spur the ‘oh! of pain’ she vocalises, her cry one of suffering as opposed to surprise. Noticeably, in ‘One Art’, an elder Bishop is more stoic and doesn’t allow herself to cry out despite her loss. Whilst her composure is rattled by the end of the poem, she fails to breakdown initially, a consequence of being alone and needing to rely upon herself. In ‘In the Waiting Room’, Bishop at first believes it is ‘Aunt Consuelo’s voice’ but then claims, ‘what took me completely by surprise was that it was me’, leading to her ‘falling, falling’. Bishop’s repetition of the verb implies her loss of balance as her thoughts spiral. She experiences ‘the sensation of falling off the round, turning world’, Bishop’s hyperbolic language emphasises the intensity of her descent and she tells herself, ‘you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too?’ Bishop’s use of italics and the pronoun ‘them’, instead of ‘her’, emphasises the grotesqueness she sees in these images; she feels need to strip these women of their femininity and is repulsed by the inevitability of becoming like them. Her tone when she rhetorically questions ‘why’ she must join them is sombre; whilst disgusted, she is saddened also. As an older Bishop writes the poem, the defeat at having to lose her youth is evident when she reminds herself of her own name, for the poet attempts to reclaim the young girl she used to be.
‘In the Waiting Room’ documents Bishop’s experience as a child entirely, she fails to provide any insight into how her adult self perceives the events. In Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery Bonnie Costello writes that the poem ‘can be read as a glimpse into an abyss’, the bottomless pit Costello refers to being adulthood. Since the speaker is her six-year-old self who has only seen pictures, Bishop can only provide a partial view into this lifestyle. However, ‘it is also a poem of baptism, into the unsheltering truth of human connection and contingency’. Costello’s criticism insinuates that whilst the poem is about a loss of innocence, new beginnings and relationships can be birthed from this. In the third stanza, Bishop’s thoughts are still spiralling. She refers to ‘those awful hanging breasts’, her hatred of them not decreasing since the first stanza, but questions whether they ‘hold us all together or made us just all one?’. Bishop rhetorically questions the similarities between herself and other women, including her aunt. She realises that all women undergo the same changes and loss and questions the happenstance of her reading the magazine amongst others in the waiting room; ‘how had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn’t?’. There is a companionship between those who undergo these alterations. Bishop’s younger self has yet to discover it, but she realises her cries could have worsened. Whilst her dislike of the woman’s breasts is unfaltering, the loss of innocence is universal.
The final two stanzas see Bishop returning to her surroundings. Costello writes that ‘Bishop often remembers a childhood world fractured by symbolic awareness’ and that ‘the experience of loss becomes associated with a discovery of discontinuity between real and symbolic presences’. Costello’s commentary proposes that Bishop treats certain moments of her youth, such as reading a magazine in a waiting room, as turning points. However, she is still a child. Her adverse reaction to adolescence were a result of a photograph as opposed to her undergoing these biological changes. Bishop writes in her final stanza, ‘it was still the fifth of February 1918’, her use of enjambment implying her thoughts have yet to settle entirely, however, she is able to identify the date and that time hasn’t progressed since she viewed the photographs. She realises that ‘Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold’, her childlike observations here are similar to the comments she made surrounding the cold weather in the first stanza. Bishop poignantly finishes the poem in full circle; her six-year-old self may have lost her innocence after viewing the pictures, however, she is still a child. She has yet to lose her youth. An older Bishop, who writes the poem, successfully identifies the turning point, as Costello writes, that her life changed.
Hi everyone!
Thank you so much for reading! I love Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, probably because it's so easy to understand what she's talking about. There are no metaphors to decode - she describes things how they are. I'll write a part two to this at some point - there's another poem I want to explore.
Stay safe out there!
Karisma
xxx