Sestina

Tears symbolize both the expression of and the repression of strong emotion. Tears offer a strategy for coping, ironically, without coping.

In the poem, tears only raise questions. There is no given reason why the grandmother, even as she moves about the kitchen, cries as she prepares the tea for her granddaughter. Tears are her way of coping with something the poem never explains. After all, the grandmother knows what neither the child nor the reader knows.

There is no explanation given for where the parents are, why the child is with her grandmother, and whether this is a visit or something more complicated. More to the point, the whole world seems to be crying. There is the autumn rain, the condensation droplets falling off the tea kettle and sizzling on the burner, and the tear-shaped buttons on the coat of the man in the child’s drawing. Even the tea itself resembles “dark brown tears” (Line 22). Finally, from the pages of the almanac suspended above the child, tiny moons seem to fall “like tears” (Line 33).

Tears, then, symbolize the powerful emotional experience that is never directly confronted but is all around. The poem suggests that the deepest, strongest traumas are handled indirectly and quietly.