First Death in Nova Scotia Literary Elements

A small child attending a wake for her cousin

Five stanzas, each containing ten lines. Its rhyme scheme and meter are irregular, but each line contains three stressed syllables, and each stanza contains several rhymed lines.

Bishop uses a metaphor to refer to a marble-topped table as a "white, frozen lake," and to call a coffin "a little frosted cake." Using simile, she writes that Arthur is "like a doll."

Alliterative clusters of "st" sounds appear in "stood a stuffed loon / shot and stuffed," while alliterative C sounds appear in both "cold and caressable;" and "Arthur's coffin was / a little frosted cake." Similarly, the words "coffin" and "frosted" in that passage feature assonant O sounds, while "eyed it / from his white" contains assonant I sounds, and "the way he always painted" contains assonant A sounds.

The poem contains a degree of dramatic irony: the speaker, still young enough not to understand death well, lacks awareness of the tragedy she is witnessing, though readers are well aware of it.

Lyric poem; elegy

Nova Scotia, Canada in the early twentieth century, during winter

Curious, apprehensive, detached, naive

The speaker is the protagonist. The closest thing to an antagonist in the poem is death itself.

The work's major conflict is the speaker's attempt to understand and contextualize death during her first encounter with it.

The poem's climax occurs in its final stanza, when the speaker wonders how her cousin will be able to reach the royal family.

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The assertion that "Since Uncle Arthur fired / a bullet into him, / he hadn't said a word" is understated. The animal being discussed is dead, and so has been entirely silenced—and indeed, clearly could not speak prior to death in any case.

The speaker alludes to the British royal family, as well as to Jack Frost, a figure from folklore who is said to paint leaves red in autumn and leave frost on windowpanes.

The statement that "The gracious royal couples / were warm in red and ermine" uses metonymy, with the color and material of clothing standing in for the clothing itself.

The loon in the poem is personified, described as watching over the room in silence.

The speaker states that Jack Frost has "always painted / the Maple Leaf (Forever)," and that he has "left (Arthur) white, forever"—employing hyperbolic-sounding language, but in this case using it more or less literally, to describe the unrelentingness of nature and the permanence of death.

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