Austin Steady

asteady23@gmail.com
English 219: Principles of Literary Study
Essay 2
4/21/14
William Tanner









Coping with an Existential Crisis in Bishop's In the Waiting Room












Language serves as humanity's major form of communication, but fails to express certain
concepts. Affect, the raw, subconscious emotion, that underlies attitude and disrupts a person
when he becomes aware of it, escapes language's widespread ability to communicate ideas.
Poetry accomplishes the task of conveying affect by utilizing poetic devices like simile,
metonymy, imagery, and line structure in order to generate tone and attitude that get the reader
closer to the raw affect lying beneath. Elizabeth Bishop, as a poet, approaches her work with
incredible detail. She meticulously constructs her poems, deliberately generating the images and
tones that she does. Bishop's poem, In the Waiting Room, similarly uses specific choices of
line structure and imagery in order to create a suitable atmosphere to introduce its moment of
affect. The crisp, matter-of-fact language becomes more awe-struck paralleling the increasingly
vivid imagery of the poem. Finally, the poem climaxes in the brief affective moment of self-
awareness in lines 60-63. The remainder of the poem attempts to explore the questions that
spring forth from such an experience. Thus, the poem builds up to its major affective moment in
lines 60-63 using tone, meter, and imagery, and explores the surreality of existing at all and as a
human.
The most important affective moment of the poem spans only four lines in the poem and
only an instant in time but achieves its significance by generating questions, realizations, and
ideas while being completely inexpressible. In lines 60-63, the speaker experiences a critical
realization: she exists, and exists as a member of humanity. Lost, she is falling off / the round,
turning world / into cold, blue-black space, before she feels her existence.(57-59) The choice to
use felt to describe her affective moment conveys the raw nature of her experience, a key
aspect of affect. In trying to rationalize her experience, the speaker states that nothing stranger /
had ever happened, that nothing / stranger could ever happen. (72-74) The speaker has just
experienced the pinnacle of strangeness and has no idea how to respond to it. She has become
aware of her fleeting moment of affect and cannot comprehend it. She then admits that she
didn't know any / word for it. (84-85) Clearly, her feeling that she is an entity absolutely
captures her despite her inability to express her extreme frisson. This fleeting moment of affect
serves as the climax of the poem, derailing the speaker's matter-of-fact tone, and generating
unanswerable, existential questions.
The speaker introduces the poem blandly with a matter-of-fact attitude. Her tone lacks
any real emotion and her attitude conveys complacency. She is, after all, in a waiting room,
intending to wait a reasonable amount of time for her aunt. After picking up the copy of National
Geographic, the speaker begins to demonstrate a fearful attitude, speaking with a perplexed and
slightly disgusted tone when describing the naked women. Her crisp and directed language at the
beginning of the poem has subsided into repeated descriptions like wound round and round
and unlikely comparisons such as like the necks of light bulbs. (27, 29-30). Her language and
tone arise from her ignorance as a young American child in 1918, she has never witnessed
such things. Her boring and familiar world is beginning to erode. She quickly snaps back to her
matter-of-fact and competent attitude when her aunt cries out. She claims she wasn't at all
surprised; / even though [she] knew she was /a foolish, timid woman. (40-42). The speaker's
attitude has now taken on a derisive aspect. She is no longer actually confident and competent
about her world. Her description of her aunt is actually just as attributable to herself, having now
witnessed the erosion of her tiny, homogeneous world. Accordingly, the speaker then realizes
that it was not her aunt crying out, but herself further reinforcing the idea that she is the foolish
and timid one. Again, she tries once more to straighten herself out in order to stop / the
sensation of falling off / the round, turning world. (56-58) Her once matter-of-fact and
confident attitude has crumbled into an attitude of instability and fear of the unknown. The
emotions captured in her shaky attitude eventually accumulate until finally she becomes exposed
to the underlying affect of them all.
The structure of the poem also plays a role in developing the environment for affect by
emphasizing the tone and attitude via enjambment and caesuras. The poem begins with a variety
of structure: first a sentence that spans multiple lines without much punctuation, followed by two
extremely short sentences. The speaker continues with her varied and natural pace of speech
until getting to the naked women in National Geographic. Here her reuse of wound round and
round hints at her recounting losing its directed purposefulness as she becomes wrapped up in
the image. Her once fluid speech starts to grind to a halt with her expressing three sentences in
only three successive lines. Then, the stanza ends with the speaker looking at the cover: / the
yellow margins, the date. (34-35) The slow pace towards the end of the stanza and the emphasis
on the magazine's date signify the speaker coming to a critical point in relation to the magazine.
The contrasting use of suddenly to start the second stanza further creates a jarring image: the
composed speaker, upon realizing the strangeness of her world, has been taken completely by
violent surprise. The second stanza's use of enjambment continues with the sense of rapidness at
a breath-taking pace. The speaker is falling at the end of the stanza, crashing into the blue-black
space in the next stanza. (59) Finally, she experiences a climactic instant of self-awareness. In
the wake of her affective moment, the speaker asks several unanswered questions. The poem
finishes in two short stanzas symbolizing the speaker's temporary inability to form full thoughts
following her affective moment. The structure of the poem thus creates an escalating sense of
urgency that naturally climaxes in the speaker's affective moment.
The poem's imagery serves as a crucial foundation for the affect to communicate itself.
Immediately with the title, the poem creates an image of open-endedness because of the lack of
real purpose found in a waiting room. The image of the waiting room, full of grown-up people,
/ arctics and overcoats, / lamps and magazines should be familiar to most readers. (8-10) The
poem ironically establishes a familiar and uninteresting image with the use of the unfamiliar.
The young speaker presumably does not know anyone else in the waiting room, but she glosses
over the details of the environment as if it were all painfully commonplace. The poem's next
images of erupting volcanoes, explorers, cannibal food, and naked exotic women, all starkly
contrast the bland waiting room. The images need to appreciated from the viewpoint of a young
child who has likely never been exposed to such things. The awesome nature of these exotic
images takes on an incredibly frightening aspect. The next image of the speaker flipping back to
the cover, and taking in the familiar yellow margins and the date, captures a moment of wide-
eyed terror. The speaker's worldview has just been shattered and her shock is captured in her
shell-shocked face now blankly staring at the magazine's date. Here, the poem's most important
affect begins to leak through the imagery. The speaker's spiraling fall into herself as she
continues to stare at the cover elicits the sinking-stomach feeling of whole-body terror. In this
infinite black void, she finally experiences an instant of self-awareness. The image of the black
space is akin to one's imagination when trying to picture the universe on its own as a lonely and
infinitesimal point. The imagery thus provides the vehicle for the jarring moment of affect by
creating an incomprehensible picture of the vast unknown.
The affective moment causes the speaker to realize not only that she is an entity, but that
she belongs to a group of similar entities, forcing her to ask why she exists. The poem lays out
the ideas that follow the affective moment clearly: the speaker first asks, Why should I be my
aunt, / or me, or anyone? (75-76) The question explores the seemingly benign concept of
feeling connected to a particular person. The young speaker seems to have experienced her first
case of deep empathy. The question then turns more philosophical, questioning why the speaker
should exist as herself. Most readers will agree that they have asked similar questions why
were they not born somewhere else as someone else? Finally, the question reaches its real
purpose: exploring the idea of existing at all. The affect of self-awareness experienced in that
blue-black space gave rise to the speaker's exploration of existential meaning. The next question
asks, What similarities- / boots, hands, the family voice / I felt in my throat, or even / the
National Geographic / and those awful hanging breasts - / held us all together / or made us all
just one? (77-83) Before developing an answer to her first question, the speaker begins to
explore her identity as a human. She felt similar enough to the people in her local waiting room,
but seeing the babies with pointed heads / wound round and round with string; / black, naked
women with necks / wound round and round with wire documented in the modern edition of
National Geographic caused her to feel alienated from humanity for a moment.(26-29) She
knows that she is one of them, but she does not know why or how. She then asks her final
question, 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? (86-89) She connects her first idea to her second, questioning
how she, and everyone else, came to be where they are currently. In short, following her
affective moment, the speaker tries to reconcile her existence as a member of humanity.
Elizabeth Bishop successfully creates an intensifying tone in her poem, In the Waiting
Room, in order to expose a moment of affect that leads to unanswerable, existential questions.
The poem begins with a crispy, matter-of-fact tone to describe the bland and familiar-feeling
waiting room. The speaker's tone conveys competence and self-confidence before beginning to
crack at the sight of the naked women. Realizing that these women are part of her world, the
speaker loses composure and tries to not lose face doing so, before finally being totally engulfed
by her realization. She experiences falling off the world into a black void when she experience
her moment of affect. She becomes extremely self-aware in one instant. The line structure
conveys a shortness of breath. The speaker begins to stammer out questions about her existence.
These questions stem from the affective moment as seen in their existential nature. Finally, in
two short stanzas, the speaker's thoughts begin to return to her surroundings. She experienced
the strangest moment of her life in an instant, and the rest of world is still the same. Descriptive
language alone fails to encapsulate the poem's affect. The deliberate line structure and choice of
words develop vivid imagery that throw the reader into the mind and sensations of the young
speaker. Readers empathize with the self-assured attitude that then crumbles in the face of the
unfamiliar unknown. The structure of the poem builds up to the speaker's climactic self-
awareness captured in a single moment. The poem following the speaker's affective moment
tries to rationalize the experience. In short, In the Waiting Room centers around an affective
moment of self-awareness that results from varied line structure and vivid imagery, and
generates several unanswerable questions.




















Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. "In the Waiting Room." Comp. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon
Stallworthy. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York: Norton, 1983. 964-966. Print.