Waiting for Adulthood: Aging in “In the Waiting Room” and “At the Fishhouses” Anonymous College

Elizabeth Bishop ends her famous poem “One Art” with the lines, “It’s evident the art of losing isn't too hard to master / though it may look like… disaster.” Although “One Art” lists many literal and symbolic forms of loss, the one that becomes the most prominent in Bishop’s poetry is the loss of time. Likewise, her poems “In the Waiting Room” and “At the Fishhouses” both display the relationship between individuals’ personal development and the passing of time. In this essay, I intend to explore the different ways in which Bishop uses imagery to demonstrate growth and maturity over time in these poems.

Although “At the Fishhouses,” which was first published in 1947, uses imagery of age and seasons very similar to that in “The Waiting Room,” which was not written until the 1970s, which suggests The speaker of the poem begins by saying, “Although it is a cold evening, / down by one of the fishhouses / an old man sits netting.” In emphasizing the cold weather, Bishop is placing the beginning of the timeline in the late fall or winter. With the old man sitting in the cold, perhaps with the risk of freezing by the water, she appears to also be inviting the reader to think of this time as the season of death, or at the very least...