Hotel lobbies are built for passing through, which is what makes "Waiting in the Lobby" so funny and so strange. Its speaker sits and watches, and what she sees is a small theatre of people who are all supposed to be doing something else. Nobody in this room is doing what the room is for. A woman circles through the revolving door "for no apparent reason," a man paces, a young man hovers by the clock, and the poem treats them all with the amused, slightly cruel attention of someone who has nothing better to look at.
The central joke is in how people are described: by their clothes. The first figure we meet is not a woman but "a mink coat," with "something inside" it that has "a hat on it / and a lot of legs and shoes." The speaker adds, with a perfectly straight face, that "the important part is the mink coat." It is a sharp little piece of social comedy: in a place of display, the garment has swallowed the person. The same method catalogues the pacing gentleman item by item, from derby to spats, until he becomes "immaculate and perfect" and therefore faintly suspicious. The list is so complete that it reads like a verdict. The speaker's instinct that he is "not as nice as he looks" comes straight out of the over-polished inventory.
Look at the form, because it carries a lot of the humour. There is no rhyme and no regular metre; the lines run as loose, conversational free verse, closer to someone muttering observations than to a song. Line length shifts with the speaker's attention. The pacing man gets short, trudging lines ("walking up and down / and back and forth"), where the phrase itself repeats like his footsteps. The young man by the clock, on the other hand, gets a long, breathless, deflating portrait: his pockets "too small for his hands," his wish that "it would get late quickly / so he wouldn't have to wait any more." That image is wonderfully precise. His awkwardness is physical, a body he does not know what to do with, and the speaker, who knows he would rather not be looked at, keeps looking anyway. Her comedy is never wholly kind.
Then comes the odd detour that holds the poem's real question. White letters "shoot down a glass tube" to a mailbox marked "MAIL EARLY," and the speaker asks, flatly, "What is early?" It is the most open moment in the poem. The slogan assumes time is something you can get ahead of, while everyone in the lobby is stuck inside it, stalled between arriving and being met. The question gets quietly answered by the rest of the scene, in which no one is early, no one is late, and everyone is simply held. Even the orchestra playing "a nostalgic tune / in a distant room" belongs to a place "where there are more people waiting." Waiting is not an interruption in this poem; it is the whole condition.
The ending turns the lens back on the watcher. After pages of cataloguing other people's purposeless motion, the speaker admits: "I am not waiting for anyone." She is, in fact, as idle as the workman she dismissed earlier as accomplishing nothing "very important," and she closes by watching him "appear and disappear behind the wooden partition / like a jack-in-the-box." The repeated simile makes a small circle of the poem. The jack-in-the-box image seemed like mockery at the start; by the end it reads almost as companionship, because the speaker has chosen the same repetitive, pointless rhythm for her own attention.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tone. It is easy to be satirical about the rich and the nervous, and the poem does that, but it also catches the loneliness hidden in a public room. The lobby is full of people and nobody speaks. "Why doesn't he speak to the mink coat?" the speaker wonders, and the question is both a joke and the saddest line in the poem. The comedy of surfaces keeps pointing at a missing connection, and the speaker, who has withdrawn into watching, is part of the problem she describes.