Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Worksheet

ELIZABETH BISHOP
(Worcester, Massachusetts, 8th February 1911-Boston, 6th October 1979)
1. Read the text with the aid of these illustrations and information that you will
find under them. Consider a possible answer for the questions you will find on
page 7.

Fig. 1. Martin and Osa Johnson in Africa in the 1920s (not 1918). They are dressed in
laced boots, jodhpurs (or riding breeches) and Trilby hats (not pith helmets, see
below). You can access their films on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhxJkiyuokg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRaxae9-tCQ&feature=related.
Talkie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJX7nEyRNUY.
In this second film you can see a child with its head bound to provoke the skull
elongation (2:06 onwards). The girl with cranial elongation in figure 5 in this Worksheet
appears in this film, too.
 Fig. 2. Pith helmets or salacots (a Tagalog loanword in Spanish).
http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltConsulta?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=salacot

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 4 and 5. Cranial elongation by binding among the South-seas natives.

Fig. 6. Ndebele (Zulu) woman from South-Africa or Zimbabwe with elongated neck.

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Fig. 7. A waiting-room in 1923 (Richland, Ohio). The USGenWeb Project.
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ohrichla/HealthDeptPhotos/9041.jpg

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Fig. 8. Cover and index of the February 1918 number of National Geographic. Check the
text of "In the Waiting Room" with this.

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 Questions for reflection and discussion

1. After reading the text carefully, think about the poetic speaker's age. How old is the
poetic "I"? When is the "action" of the poem set? Use the preceding cultural references
and many others in the text to work this out. Who is the poetic "I" of the poem?

2. Do these cultural references interact to form a coherent background to the text?

3. Bearing in mind your answer to the previous question, is this of significance to the
theme of the poem?

4. What is the theme of the poem? Summarise it using abstract nouns, without repeating
any words from the text.

5. Does this text reflect an autobiographical event? Or are there elements of fiction in it?

IMPORTANT: don't ask your tutor to provide you with answers, discuss the possible
answers and points of view (as well as information) you as individual students have,
and try to agree on a possible interpretation. Your tutor's mission then is to moderate
the debate and guide the discussion. The debate must be carried out in English.

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