First Death in Nova Scotia

There are numerous things that youngsters do not recognize. Their lack of encounter makes them ignorant to what is happening around them, and even oblivious to the presence of death. When someone a child knows dies, it is a really rough transition: Where did he go? Am I not going to be in a position to see him once more? What will come about next? When a individual is young, that person’s understanding is significantly less developed, so there is a lot of questioning. “First Death in Nova Scotia” is about a little girl that just experienced her initial loss, which was the death of her tiny cousin Arthur. The speaker introduces us, the readers, to the scenario she has to endure and tries to make us recognize what it is for her with a couple of childish analogies. Elizabeth Bishop confronts innocence with death in the hands of a tiny girl, who does not know a thing about death. Bishop gathers a variety of concepts and strategies in the poem demonstrate the innocence of the speaker.

One of those concepts is the language, a simple, childlike vocabulary which tends to make us realize her way of thinking. With her vocabulary, the speaker portrays her confusion and ignorance about death since of the metaphors and similes that she utilizes. In the fourth stanza she stated, “He was all white, like a doll / that hadn’t been painted yet” (31-32). This comparison shows the lack of description the speaker has to say about her cousin simply because she is a young girl who has had a genuinely satisfied, enjoyable childhood and has never ever knowledgeable such a sad and confusing point. It is out of her comfort zone. Another instance is in the third stanza, “Arthur’s coffin was / a tiny frosted cake” (28). This language utilised shows how the speaker tries connect the scenario with the items she is familiar with to produce an image of her cousin so she can realize what is happening. This comparisons shows her understanding about death, which is truly poor. This is how Bishop emphasizes the notion of death becoming a new factor to the speaker and how hard it is for her to explain what she sees. Confusion is one more point the author uses within the poem to show how difficult this situation is for the child, and how she is facing it for the very first time. In the third stanza the speaker’s mother tells her, “Come and say goodbye / to your small cousin Arthur” (22-23). She’s so confused that she doesn’t know what to do and her mother has to guide her into this method. This is also the only point mentioned referring her cousin’s death, no 1 shows any emotion towards Arthur’s death. It is as though the small girl is the only 1 that cares about him. This silence aids to intensify the small girl’s confusion. In the last stanza the speaker says: “But how could Arthur go, clutching his tiny lily, with his eyes shut up so tight and the roads deep in the snow?” (47-50). She knows he’s gone, but at the exact same time she doesn’t know. It is that feeling same 1 gets when a single knows that anything happened but you do not know why it happened, what exactly happened, or what is going to occur subsequent. She just knows that he left her and she is not going to see him once more, she is uncertain of exactly where her cousin is. But, the sentence that shows all of the speaker’s confusion is in stanza quantity two, exactly where she says: “Since Uncle Arthur fired / a bullet into him, / he hadn’t stated a word” (11-13). The reader gets the feeling that Uncle Arthur is the a single who killed cousin Arthur because the author does not specifies who the “him” is, but in reality is indicating the death of the loon that uncle Arthur killed earlier. This confusion is created so the reader would get a sense of what it is like to being the speaker, and what is taking place in the speaker’s mind. One more way the author indicates the tiny girl’s confusion is the absence of words like “death”, “dying”, or “dead”, with the title as an exception. This vocabulary indicates that speaker is also young to realize the whole death concept, and she does not know how to refer to it.

The repetition of cold and neutral colors, like white, symbolizes the idea the speaker has towards death, which demonstrates that the speaker sees her cousin’s death colorless and cold, anything damaging and depressing. This symbology isolates death producing it stand out from other items for instance, white is a color distinct from other people, a distinctive color. The cold can also mean the idea that when somebody close dies, it seems like the entire planet freezes. The speaker tries to contrast the white-theme with some red motifs like the “red eyed-loon” (29), or when she refers to the “red robes” of the royalty characters. Nevertheless, this warm, life idea with the color red is significantly scarcer than the cold, death pattern created with the white color, producing them the main topic of the poem. That is a genuinely immature and innocent notion some 1 can have about death, since it is not just that. For many cultures, death is one thing effective and majestic, and they venerate it, it can be as equal as life and birth. As an example of that, in the second stanza she states this description, “His breast was deep and white, / cold and caressable” We all know that when you died, you get cold simply because of a phase known as the algor mortis or “death chill” but in addition to that she desires to connect and specify cold and white with death. There is continual referral the speaker makes about Jack Frost, who is associated to cold, white, winter weather. In the fourth stanza, the speaker said he has usually painted “the Maple Leaf (Forever)” and describes how he is starting to paint Arthur’s hair “and left him white, forever” (34-40). This is how the girl makes death a separate thing of everything else. At the very starting of the poem, the speaker says, “In the cold, cold parlor / my mother laid out Arthur” (1). In this line, there is a reference Bishop tends to make about Nova Scotia, a truly cold place in Canada which is also the poorest, most desolate and discontent province there is in the nation, also the girl states that small Arthur has been separated from the rest of the household, creating again the isolation of death. In the same stanza, the speaker says there is a dead red loon that has been placed in the identical area as Arthur, and once more the isolation is being brought into the poem.

Lastly, the rhyme scheme in the poem it is quite simple and consequently it tends to make it effortless to create, or consider. Bishop makes use of words children, like the speaker, can realize and make, such as “cake” (28) with “lake” (30), and “small” (31) with “doll” (32). This shows the author’s innocent, childlike, simple, and ignorant notion that young individuals have towards death. Several elements of the poem match in this idea, and tends to make a steady theme in the complete piece.

Soon after reading “First Death in Nova Scotia” by Elizabeth Bishop, we can extract a lot of themes from the poem. Nonetheless, the revelation of death at an early age is the principal problem. Bishop makes use of a lot of methods like confusion, basic vocabulary, rhyme scheme, and symbology to represent the theme. The confrontation of this strategies and the thesis statement give as an thought of the speaker’s thoughts and guide us to understand the pick of words in the poem. The speaker take us in every predicament she is experiencing and describes it in a very unique way, just like a kid would.