in the waiting room by Elizabeth Bishop

Miranda Linden
English 525
Paper # 1
10/23/03

In the Waiting Room

The journey to becoming a grown adult can often be surprising and hard to handle. When we are young the venture is intimidating and seems to never get any easier throughout its course. Our hardest feats differ from person to person. And even after the lessons of life are learned, we often have to look back at the lesson’s inception to reinstall its values during the course of our lifetime. This is what happens in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, In the Waiting Room. In this poem we see that Elizabeth’s struggles came with identification and placing herself in the world as a woman. She shows us, through this writing, the struggle she has to identify herself with the world and its population. With a fine line between reality and imagination, and a structure catering to her story, Bishop has created a poem that gives us not only a strong image, but also a great sense of emotion.
This poem tells the...