First Death in Nova Scotia Analysis

The poem, “First Death in Nova Scotia” was authored by Elizabeth Bishop in 1962 and is an autobiographical in the sense that the poet speaks in the poem through a narrator or first-person point of view. It is mainly addressing on the theme of death by using the perspective of a child who is having difficult to come to understanding of what death is after attending the funeral of her cousin, Arthur, and, thus, observes the surrounding scenes to comprehend it better.

By the use different literary devices and elements such as imagery, metaphor, epithet, symbol and many others, it becomes evident that the poem is majorly about death. The speaker also does mention and put forward themes of childhood and royalty quite vastly which convey an essential meaning of the poem as well.

Looking at the topic of death, we can easily identify this from the beginning of the poem. In the first two lines of the poem the speaker writes: “In the cold, cold parlour / My mother laid out Arthur” (Bishop, Elizabeth, 1-2).

The mother of the speaker placing Arthur in that positions creates an imagery of a dead body ready for funeral. A little after, in the same stanza, the speaker does mention a loon which has been filled to preserve it after it had been “shot and stuffed by Uncle” (9). The writer, a young girl, has been brought to the scene to observe the body, to say good-bye and have a first experience of death. The mention of the loon here shows its symbolic connection to Arthur since they are both dead.

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This connection is further manifested using alliteration and rhyme as in “frosted cake” (28) and “frozen lake” (30). The sounds that comes with these words bring attention to the lines in which it is used and helps create rhythm. Those words show use of meter with stressed and unstressed syllables to signify emphasis of the matter. This further hints about death as a dead person gets cold and flat which has parallelism of Arthur and loon. Notedly, the poem doesn’t have a clear rhyme scheme even though there are some instances of it as in stanza one where words “parlour” (1) and “father” (10) are used as well as in stanza two; “fired” (11) and “desired” (20).

The speaker, on other hand, uses personification to describe the condition of the loon after it was shot dead by Uncle Arthur as she writes:

“Since Uncle Arthur fired

a bullet into him,

he hadn’t said a word.

He kept his own council” (11-14)

The author gives humanly characteristics to an inanimate being, the loon, in above lines of second stanza which creates an intense image and stress the speaker’s imagination. A bird is uncapable of talking with sense as well as keeping secret or having ownership of something. The last line of the above quote could be a symbolic for death in the sense that corpses don’t give neither secret nor any information. The above, last quoted statements, uses as in many other parts of the poem, line breaks wherein a line is divided into two separate lines to show continuity of ideas. This suggests that the organizing principles in the poem is not chronological as we find mentioning of the royal family in the first and last stanza, but rather associational. It is also sort of psychological since the author speaks from the psychology of a small child which may not translate to her real age at the time of writing the poem.

Moreover, the author mentions, “Jack Frost had dropped the brush / and left him white, forever” (39-40), which could symbolize the reality of death as being such irreversible state and that Arthur would never be ever brought back to life. The use of the word “forever” (36 & 40) about Jack Frost’s painting on Arthur and dropping of the brush could mean commonality of death to all living things and death leaving one as ever immobile just like the brush on the ground. Another thing that can mention more about the subject of death is the “lily of the valley” (25) which is often used allegorically in funeral as a symbolic word for death.

At the end part of the poem, the speaker uses rhetoric as indicated:

“But how could Arthur go,

clutching his tiny lily,

with his eyes shut up so tight

and the roads deep in snow?” (47-50).

The rhetoric conveys an essential meaning of the poem in such away that it draws our attention to the reality surrounding the dead body of Arthur. It highlights the impossibility of Arthur waking up from death as compared to the road deep in snow which makes it impassable and given his eyes are shut. We also see here the power of death through Arthur’s eyes so tightly closed. It can also mean that the author is questioning the afterlife and its possibility after Arthur’s death or perhaps is about the confusion of the speaker on the topic of death by lacking clear understanding of it due to her young age.

One of the other themes addressed in the poem is childhood. On one hand the speaker seems to be a child from many instances. This is somehow displayed when the mother of the speaker uses the statements: “Come and say good-bye” (22) to the speaker as a way of giving her guidelines and instructions as often used for kids and young children. The lines following that makes clearer the young age or childhood of the speaker;

“I was lifted up and given

one lily of the valley

to put in Arthur’s hand.” (24-26). It tells us that the speaker needs to be carried up to lay the lily in Arthur’s hand which she can’t probably do it by herself. On other hand the dead body, Arthur, is depicted as being young. The speaker’s mother “laid out Arthur” (2) which can’t be used for an adult person as one is heavy and needs many hands to carry him/her. Describing on the coffin of Arthur, it is mentioned as a “a little frosted cake” (28). A metaphor is used here to assert a correlation between the smaller size of little cake and that of Arthur. Also saying that “Arthur was very small. / He was all white, like a doll” (31-32), significantly put forward the young age of Arthur that comes from his smaller size. Besides, the metaphor used in the form of a simile tells more on the childhood of Arthur.

Finally, the theme of royalty is quite evident in the poem. There is a mention of some prominent features that are members of the British family. Their chromatographs or illustrations are being kept in the room which shows respect for them and how much they are being valued. Also, the speaker writes: “The gracious royal couples / were warm in red and ermine;” (41-42). Here the speaker uses imagery to attach a feeling of warmth and comfort to the royal family and using ermine — symbol of purity — puts them in a higher status.

The tone of the poem is one of bewilderment, confusion and speechlessness. We find a lot of repetition of words like “stuffed” (8 & 9), “white” (15, 17, 30, 32 & 40) , “…painted yet” (33), “…paint him” (34) and “…always painted” (35) and many others which adds emphasis on the subject matter but at the same shows how the speaker is speechless and lost of words.

In conclusion, we can say that the speaker uses different language techniques to put across themes of death