Sestina

“Sestina” (1956), by New England poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), ostensibly recreates a quiet moment shared by a child and her grandmother in a kitchen on a rainy autumn afternoon. As the grandmother busies herself preparing an afternoon snack of hot tea and bread, the child draws bold, colorful crayon pictures that she proudly shares with her grandmother.

Yet nothing feels quite right. Reflecting her background in contrapuntal music composition, Bishop creates subtle feelings of both grief, unspoken and unshared, and joy, newly discovered and tentative. Those feelings, impossible to define exactly, give the otherwise unremarkable domestic scene an urgency and emotional tension that lurks beneath and within the simple moment that the poem records.

Published at the height of Bishop’s long career, which included winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, “Sestina” epitomizes the writer’s signature style. Often regarded as a poet’s poet because of her command of intricate and innovative forms, Bishop here uses the sestina, a form of poetry that dates to early Renaissance France. Its complex system of cyclical repetition evokes transformation and the changing of the seasons, much as the poem’s content does.

In addition to exploring this use of form as a theme, the poem examines strategies for handling the tectonic impact of loss, the consolations of family during such traumas, and the complicated joy of creativity as a tonic in such difficult moments.

Poet Biography

Though Elizabeth Bishop never subscribed to her generation’s faith in poetry as a vehicle for confessional revelation, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell among them, aspects of “Sestina” reflect Bishop’s childhood. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father, a wealthy entrepreneur, died when she was five months old, and her mother would be institutionalized three years later. Young Elizabeth was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in faraway Nova Scotia. When she was a teenager, her paternal grandparents petitioned for legal custody, and Bishop returned to Massachusetts.

A sickly child, Bishop spent much of her time reading poetry and practicing the piano. She matriculated at Vassar College, a prestigious liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in literature. Paralyzing stage fright prevented her from pursuing music composition, her first love.

With her trust fund, Bishop traveled for two decades, including lengthy stays in Ireland, Brazil, and the Florida Keys. She kept a journal and began writing poetry. Bishop meticulously crafted her poetic lines, sometimes taking months to sculpt the exact line she wanted. Her first book of poems, North & South (1946), contained only 30 poems. Critics praised Bishop’s brooding meditative tone, eye for detail, elegant experiments in arcane poetic forms, and pitch-perfect, syllable-crisp control of sound. In 1950, on the strength of that volume, Bishop was appointed Poetry Consultant for the Library of Congress, now considered America’s Poet Laureateship. When North & South was republished in 1955 with additional verses, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Over two decades, Bishop published just five slender volumes. Her complete poems, published in 1969, won the National Book Award. When her inheritance money ran out in 1969, she reluctantly accepted an appointment at Harvard, where she taught creative writing for seven years.

Bishop died in Boston in 1979, and her cremains were interred in Hope Cemetery in Worcester. Her memorial stone bears a quote from her poem “The Bight”: “All the untidy activity continues / Awful but cheerful” (Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Bight.” Blue Ridge Journal, Lines 35-36).

Poem text

Bishop, Elizabeth. “Sestina.” 1956. All Poetry.

Summary

As the poem opens, it is a rainy late afternoon in early fall. In the “failing light” (Line 2) of a kitchen, a young girl is being entertained by her grandmother, who reads anecdotes and jokes from an almanac, a yearly publication designed largely for rural people that gathered humorous stories, recipes, year-long weather forecasts, and even astronomical information. The two laugh over the stories, but something is amiss. The grandmother is holding back tears.

In Stanza 2, the grandmother tells herself that her held-back tears are understandable, even predictable, as if the almanac could have predicted them. In her heart, she feels as if her tears are “equinoctial” (Line 7), that is, timed to the autumn equinox itself. However, she wants to keep her sadness to herself, and thus she busies herself making tea and cutting thick slices of bread for an impromptu tea party with her granddaughter.

In Stanza 3, the snack is ready, but the young girl is more fascinated by the tiny beads of condensation, like tears, dropping slowly off the tea kettle and then sizzling onto the hot stovetop. The droplets “dance like mad” (Line 15), how, she imagines, outside the “rain must dance on the house” (Line 16).

With the afternoon snack ready, the grandmother dutifully rehangs the almanac just above where the girl sits. The little book hovers, its pages open above the child like a bird’s wings. For the grandmother, her cup of hot tea seems filled with “dark brown tears” (Line 22), suggesting the secret sorrow that she cannot ignore and cannot or will not share with the child. Instead, she tells the girl that the house feels suddenly “chilly” (Line 24), and she heaps more wood into the Marvel stove.

In Stanza 4, as they share the snack, the girl uses crayons to draw a picture of a “rigid house” (Line 27) with a tidy garden and a twisting path leading to its front door. She adds the figure of a man in a coat with buttons shaped like tears. When she finishes the drawing, the girl proudly shows it to her grandmother.

Even as the grandmother “busies herself about the stove” (Line 32), something magical happens. As if in some animated film or fairy tale, the “little moons” (Line 33) that decorate the borders of the pages of the almanac quietly drop from the book where it hangs. The moons fall into the flower bed that the girl had “carefully placed” (Line 36) in her drawing.

In the closing stanza, the almanac itself speaks: “Time to plant tears” (Line 37), it says, suggesting that it may be time to move beyond crying. The grandmother now sings to the “marvelous stove” (Line 38), and the child begins work on a new crayon drawing of another “inscrutable house” (Line 39).