Graduate Work

Response Paper

“Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop

The form of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Sestina” has a direct reflection on the meaning. Each stanza is composed of six lines, each ending with the same six words that repeat throughout the poem: house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, and tears. The poem is permeated with sadness and loss. The poem altogether is an unbroken scene of a grandmother reading an almanac to her grandchild and then each of them getting pulled into their own personal activities or musings all within the same small space of the kitchen next to the “Little Marvel Stove” (Bishop 2017). While the poem as a whole is one unit of time and place, the stanzas serve to break up the shifting meaning of the words and the shifting internalization of the theme of sadness.

The first stanza opens with September rains falling outside of this warm little interior space, the kitchen. The grandmother is externally happy, but internally grief-ridden, “reading the jokes from the almanac, / laughing and talking to hide her tears” (Bishop 2017). There is clearly something that is bothering the grandmother that she wants to hide from her grandchild. It is in the second stanza that we begin to see a shift. The grandmother and grandchild are now no longer engaging in the same activity. The grandmother leaves the child and begins to tend to things on the stove. The third stanza focuses on the child’s naivety and curiosity over the “small hard tears” and “hot black stove” paying her grandmother no mind (Bishop 2017). We begin to see the dichotomy between the grief of the grandmother and the innocence of her grandchild.

As the stanzas continue we can see the gap between the two characters growing wider as they both begin to internalize their experiences. The almanac that seemed to have forecasted her tears, “she thinks that her equinoctial tears / and the rain that beast on the roof of the house / were both foretold by the almanac” making the line “the almanac hovers half open above the child, / hovers above the old grandmother” a manifestation of her grief. She sees her grief as something she could have predicted. In the fifth stanza we can see the prophetic objects of the stove and the almanac actually speaking, “It was to be, says the Marvel Stove, / I know what I know, says the almanac” (Bishop 2017). In this same stanza we see the shift away from the grandmother’s grief to the grandchild. The child is drawing a “rigid house” with a man “with buttons like tears” (Bishop 2017). It is possible that there is a reason the child has drawn a man with tears for buttons. It is possible that this man is the cause of the grandmother’s grief.

The sixth stanza seems to spring hope within the otherwise melancholy poem. The “moons fall down like tears / from between the pages of the almanac / into the flower bed” (Bishop 2017). The child is taking this sadness and “growing” new life and new hope through her own innocence. The last triplet of the poem begins with “Time to plant tears” possibly meaning that the time for grief as come to an end. It is time to let go of that grief and allow for new life.

The key word among the six repeating words, although they are all important to the meaning of the poem, is “tears” as it shows the greatest evolution throughout the poem and simply by connotation is the one that best conveys sadness. In the first stanza we can equate the rain outside with the grandmother’s tears. Her sadness has even extended to the weather. The second stanza refers to the tears as equinoctial, something we can think of as seasonal or reoccurring. The tears are then transferred from the grandmother to the observations of the child of the teakettle as it begins to sing. The tears are then described as a “teacup full of dark brown tears” meaning the tea the grandmother has brewed (Bishop 2017). We can see here that the grandmother is still holding on to this grief while the child is unaware of its weight or presence in the room. The child then draws the man with tears for buttons, which as I referred to earlier, can possibly be a representation of who the grandmother is grieving for. The tears are then described as moons that fall into the child’s doodled flower bed, finally ending with the almanac saying that it is “Time to plant tears” (Bishop 2017). This refers to an end to this cycle of grief experienced by the grandmother. As the moons wane the poem suggests that this period of grief for the grandmother does as well, finding new hope in the child.

The title of this poem, “Sestina” refers directly to the form in which it was written. Janine Rogers states in her article “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sestina’ and DNA Structure” that “The title, ‘Sestina,’ appears to simply identify the poetic form that Bishop chose for her story […]. Reading this poem, however, we do not experience it as a display of cold or abstract mechanics. Instead it is a raw and deeply emotional, for all the empirical details of the underlying sorrow […] are concealed from the reader” (Rogers 2010, 93). The poem undermines the readers expectations of “cold or abstract mechanics” based on the title. As the nature of a sestina is inherently complex, the complexity of the relationships that Bishop describes are also reflected in the title. The circular recycling of words throughout the poem reflects the patterns of behavior of the characters included within the poem. By naming the poem, “Sestina,” Bishop both clues in the reader to the complexity and deceives them with simplicity.