Sestina

Correspondence that Elizabeth Bishop maintained with poet Marianne Moore reveals that the working title of this poem was “Early Sorrow,” a reference to Bishop’s childhood in Canada. Bishop’s later decision to use the title to focus on the poem’s form rather than its subject suggests the form’s importance.

First developed by traveling troubadours in 12th-century France, who found the repeating word pattern helpful in memorizing long ballads, a sestina is made up of six unrhymed, six-line stanzas (called sestets) and closes with a tercet, a three-line envoi, French for “a sending off.” The sestina form enjoyed a renaissance with the early-20th-century Modernists, most notably T. S. Eliot, whom Bishop admired, and their efforts to reanimate poetry by reviving arcane forms.

The sestina is a complicated pattern of echoed words. In it, the words that conclude the six lines of the opening sestet—in this case, “house,” “grandmother,” “child,” “stove,” “almanac,” and “tears”—are also the closing words of all the lines that follow, save in different order. The closing envoi contains all six words, two per line.

However, the intricate patterning is more than pattern for pattern’s sake; form is theme (See: Further Reading & Resources). For Bishop, the sestina, with its repetitive, cyclical pattern, suggests the emotional state of the grandmother and the child.