I first came across the poem “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop in my senior-year AP Literature class. At first, having been unfamiliar with the sestina form, I did not recognize that this poem was a sestina at all and was thoroughly confused by all the repetition of images and words.
It wasn’t until last week, when I came across the poem again in my Norton Anthology, that I realized the poem was a sestina, explaining the circular imagery and motions throughout the poem.
“Sestina” begins with the image of “September rain” falling on the house of a grandmother and her grandchild, both of whom are in the kitchen watching the tea kettle boil and reading an almanac.
Tracing the basic “plot” of the poem, we see the grandmother turn to more practical affairs like adding more wood to the stove and preparing the tea in the kettle. However she is continually drawn back toward the child who draws a picture of a man for her. The poem ends with both characters absorbed back in their own actions.
The poem revolves around the differences in emotion between the grandmother and the child. It lays the grandmother’s pain and grief next to the child’s curiosity and naivety. The six words repeated in each stanza are “house,” “grandmother,” “child,” “stove,” “almanac,” and “tears,” and these repeated words and resulting circular imagery in “Sestina” seem to be at its heart in developing the comparison between the two characters.
The grandmother is described as “laughing and talking to hide her tears” in the first stanza, but later in the poem, her teacup is “full of dark brown tears.” The lines showing her ever-present pain and inner turmoil are interwoven with the lines showing the child’s contentment as she “shows [her pictures] proudly to the grandmother.” They are interwoven because the sestina form dictates it.
In fact it’s implied that the root of the grandmother’s sadness is represented in the child’s drawing of “a man with buttons like tears.” Although the grandmother’s reaction to her grandchild’s drawing isn’t explicitly stated, the next stanza details “little moons [that] fall down like tears / from between the pages of the almanac.”
Readers can infer that this man was important to the grandmother, and she is trying to hide her unresolved grief from her grandchild, probably to preserve the child’s bright and curious outlook on the world.
Obviously the choice of the six repeating end-words guides the images and messages that a sestina can contain. But just the fact that there are repeating end-words at all — in addition to various extra words that Bishop chose to repeat, including “rain” and “sings” — emphasizes the cyclical nature of the grandmother and grandchild’s existence. Each seems stuck in her respective emotional state. The grandmother cannot rise out of her mourning, while the child continually draws houses and wonders about the man with buttons.
Upon reading this poem the first time, I found it merely intriguing, but it wasn’t until I read through it again that I began to feel the sadness underlying the grandmother’s actions. I appreciate that this sestina, like all good poems, offers readers a deeper meaning than its literal presentation on the page and that it accomplishes this feat by embracing and taking advantage of its structural format rather than succumbing to its limitations.
