18 pages • 36 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopFirst Death in Nova Scotia
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The first four stanzas contain 10 lines each, making them a décima. The fifth stanza has four lines, a quatrain. The final stanza features six lines, making it a sestet. The form mimics the content. The first four decimas are narrow and somewhat long, replicating Arthur’s coffin, which the speaker compares to “a little frost cake” (28). The stanzas look like tiny treats that the reader can pick up and eat.
The quatrain focuses on the royal figures. The speaker includes four members of the monarchy—“Edward, Prince of Wales, / with Princess Alexandra, / and King George with Queen Mary” (Lines 4-6), acknowledging the four royals by giving each one a separate line. In the quatrain, the speaker notes that the royals are “warm in red and ermine” (Line 44); the cozy stanza reinforces their warmth. The concluding sestet reinforces Arthur’s incompatibility with the royals. He can’t return to them due to his closed eyes and the wintery weather, which enlarges his stanza by two lines—two too many for the previous royal stanza.
Bishop’s poem is an example of free verse, which lacks a predetermined meter or a rhyme scheme. The lack of a discernible meter reinforces the eeriness of the poem. Bishop’s speaker is free to create different patterns. The absence of rhyme advances the stark, objective tone. Often, the poem sounds flat or unemotional. At the same time, Bishop works in some rhymes, like “cake” (Line 28) and “lake” (Line 30) or “go” (Line 47) and “snow” (Line 50). The scattering of rhymes signals interdependence. The sounds’ connections, though, like with the other connections in the poem, are not consistent or predictable.
Enjambment
With enjambment, the poet breaks a line when there’s no natural grammatical pause. Bishop’s poem contains many enjambments, like when the speaker states, “I was lifted up and given / one lily of the valley / to put in Arthur's hand” (Lines 24-26). None of the line breaks accompany a punctuation mark; the forced breaks advance the poem’s jarring, unfamiliar atmosphere. The enjambments compel the reader to pause in strange places and fragment the reading experience.
The broken lines reflect the displacement and rearrangement in the poem, where the speaker breaks normative boundaries and creates perplexing links between Arthur, the loon, Jack Frost, and the English monarchs. The enjambments represent the lack of human connection in the poem. Similar to the lines, the emotional bonds experience a sense of being fractured.
The atonal sound furthers the abruptness of the lines. It’s as if Bishop took a block of prose and tore it into lines. The fifth stanza reads,
The gracious royal couples
were warm in red and ermine;
their feet were well wrapped up
in the ladies' ermine trains (Lines 41-44).
The enjambments and flat sound point out the brittle boundary between poetry and prose. They mirror the brittle demarcations between life, death, objects, animals, representations, and humans.
Repetition
Repetition is a literary device where the poet purposely repeats words to emphasize a theme, motif, symbol, etc. or to create a sense of lyricism or rhythm. Bishop’s speaker uses repetition immediately, stating, “In the cold, cold parlor” (Line 1). The double appearance of “cold” emphasizes the frosty atmosphere and the lack of emotion surrounding the funeral. The repetition of “white” links to snow and reinforces the icy tone. The multiple appearances of “white” also emphasize the speaker and Arthur’s purity. Yet purity isn’t necessarily comforting or safe, as “white” also suggests how both death and colonialism linger, haunting people.
At times, repetition makes the poem less clear and exacerbates its puzzling aspects. The repetition advances the riddle-like quality of the poem and its goal to make death unfamiliar to the reader. The repetition of “he” and “him” in the second stanza makes it difficult to discern Uncle Arthur from the loon and destabilizes the boundary between the human and bird and the living and the dead. The speaker also collides the identities of Arthur and Uncle Arthur by placing the two Arthurs next to one another—“Uncle / Arthur, Arthur’s father” (Lines 9-10).
In Bishop’s poem, repetition doesn’t always lead to clarity—sometimes, it sows confusion.
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By Elizabeth Bishop
