Sestina

September rain falls on the house.

In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the
house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard
tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the
stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the
house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous
stove
and the child draws another inscrutable
house.
Elizabeth Bishop
Because of the sestina form, this is kind of
a wild, circular summary, but we'll take
you for little ring around the rosy. It's
September, late afternoon, and it's raining
out. A grandmother and her
granddaughter are inside making a snack
and some tea. To kill some time while the
water boils, they read the almanac and
make jokes out of what they find. Even
though the grandmother is laughing, it
seems she is upset about something,
because she's trying to hide her tears.
At this point, both the grandmother and
the grandchild seem to disappear into
their own private thoughts. The
grandmother thinks how her sadness
might be connected to the time of year,
and the child is distracted by the
condensation forming on the teakettle.
While the grandmother tidies uphanging
the almanac back on its string, putting
more wood on the stovethe child draws
a picture of a house and a man "with
buttons like tears" to show to her
grandma.
The poem ends in a pretty imaginative
way, with the almanac dropping imaginary
moons from its pages into the flower bed
of the kid's drawing, then saying "time to
plant tears"; the grandmother singing to
the stove; and the child drawing another
scribble of a house with her crayons.
Sestina
Author: Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Type of Poem: Narrative
First Published: 1956; collected
in Questions of Travel, 1965

The Poem
In "Sestina," Elizabeth Bishop tells a
painful story of a grandmother and a child
living with loss. The story, set in a kitchen
on a rainy late afternoon in September,
features two actions: having tea and
drawing. Although the woman tries to
remain cheerful and thus protect the child,
her tears give away her sadness. The
child, meanwhile, not only observes these
troubling signs but also draws a house
that makes her proud. By the final nine
lines of the poem, a surprising thing
happens, unnoticed by the grandmother.
The buttons in the drawing become "little
moons" and "fall down like tears/ . . . into
the flower bed the child/ has carefully
placed" in the drawing. Thus, while the
characters are very close to one another,
there is a contrast-even an oppositionbetween them. The grandmother tries to
make the desolate day pleasant, while the
child imagines and draws a world
preoccupied with tears.
Read aloud, "Sestina" assumes a
wondering, storybook tone, especially as
the more fanciful details emerge. The
teakettle produces "tears" that "dance."
The almanac, which both provides the
grandmother with jokes and reinforces her
sense of doom, "hovers" in a "Birdlike"
fashion. Both the almanac and the stove
speak.
These details distinguish the child's
perspective from the grandmother's. In
the opening lines, the grandmother
devotes considerable effort to amusing
the child. However, as the poem
continues, the child's role comes to the
fore, first through his or her perceptions
and then through his or her drawing. The
result is subversive, the child's intuition
undercutting the will of the woman. The
locus of the struggle is revealed in
adjectives: "small hard," "mad," "hot

black," "clever," "Birdlike," "rigid," and

"inscrutable." Reading such words, one
senses greater vibrancy than in the lines
depicting the grandmother-the child's
developing independence, perhaps, or
anger, whether it be directed at the
grandmother or elsewhere, that the child's
pain spawns.
"Sestina" never states the cause of the
characters' sadness. The fact that it is a
man whom the child draws "with buttons
like tears" may suggest that someone-the
grandfather or perhaps the child's fatherhas died or left. Certainly, the grief is
serious, for the final three lines indicate
that the problem will persist. A study of
Bishop's life reveals her father died when
she was one year old, but the absence
that may have troubled her more was that
of her mother, whom Bishop never saw
after she was institutionalized for serious
mental illness. The loss of both parents
resulted in the young Bishop spending
time with her grandmother in Nova Scotia
as well as having to move unwillingly to
Massachusetts to attend school. Bishop
never outgrew the specter of her mother
and the terrible feeling of not belonging.
Forms and Devices
Bishop grouped "Sestina" with several
other poems about her childhood in Nova
Scotia in her 1965 book Questions of
Travel. Living in Brazil, she found, brought
back vivid memories of life in Great
Village, along the Bay of Fundy. In
"Sestina," as well as "Manners" and "First
Death in Nova Scotia," a child figures
prominently, providing a persona through
which the mature poet presents the past.
The latter two poems use first-person
point of view, the child's voice telling the
story, but "Sestina" uses the third person.
This device blends the poet's adult
perspective with the child's. It also permits
Bishop to control the emotional distance

between the reader and the character. The

first stanzas focus on the grandmother,
but when Bishop presents the child's
perception of the teakettle in the third
stanza, the language becomes more
urgent. The choice of the third person may
have helped Bishop treat highly charged
memories, may have allowed her, in other
words, to steady herself emotionally and
use the characters-human and not-to
reenact a persisting trauma.
The setting-both atmosphere and place-is
also vital to the story. The chilly, rainy
weather, as mentioned earlier, mirrors the
unhappiness in the kitchen. Bishop set the
poem at a turning point-a liminal moment.
The season, as the month and the word
"equinoctial" signal, is changing. It is
likely, given the fact that Nova Scotia sits
halfway between the equator and the
North Pole, that "the failing light" is also
seasonal. On the other hand, the kitchen,
particularly the stove, permits Bishop to
emphasize the grandmother's desire for
warmth and comfort. The stove, in fact, is
reminiscent of fairy tales, especially those
in which security and nurturing prepare for
a child's maturing.
The poetic form Bishop chose, the sestina,
imparts a sense of suspension. This form,
which originated in Provenal verse of the
Middle Ages, requires the repetition of six
words at the ends of lines. The order
changes in a prescribed way through six
stanzas of six lines, then the six words
appear, two per line, in a three-line envoy.
Using letters to represent the key words,
one finds that the abcdef order of the first
stanza becomes faebdc in the second,
thencfdabe in the third, and so on. That
these words happen to be nouns
emphasizes the symbolic, or iconic, nature
of the story. The envoy compresses the
repetition into three lines, providing
finality. This elaborate, regular remixing
can have impressive emotional impact;

perhaps one should say that this artistry

highlights the poet's patterns of thought.
In "Sestina," the repetition seems
obsessive, emphasizing the isolation of
the scene and the way it encloses the
characters. It is particularly easy to feel
the repetition as the first line of a stanza
ends with the last word of the previous
stanza. Regardless of the number of
arrangements of the final words, the sense
of loss persists. The envoy makes it clear
that the trauma has not been resolved.
As much as one examines devices, there
remains a feature-tone-that might best be
called pure Bishop style. Labels such as
"bemused," "knowing," "detached,"
"ironic," and "whimsical" catch elements
of it. The emphasis upon tears, and the
artificial way they are portrayed, is one
trademark, as is the precise sense of
visual detail (Bishop herself sketched and
did watercolors). In addition, this poem
often sounds like prose: the use of
dialogue, for example, and the long,
careful sentence comprising the sixth
stanza.
"Sestina," in other words, is not personal
confession, as the lack of personal names
indicates, but representative in the way
that a tale is. Along with the persona, the
point of view, and the poetic form, the
language creates a complex experience
for the reader. One sympathizes with both
the grandmother and the child, sensing
sorrow, yearning, and the tensing of the
child's effort to be an individual within the
sheltering, suffocating domestic scene. Yet
one also hears a wariness in Bishop's
telling of their story.
Themes and Meanings
Read within the context of fairy tales,
"Sestina" speaks not only of profound
sorrow but also of personal growth. The
grandmother may pretend to be happy in

order to maintain stability and provide

shelter, but the child recognizes the
difficult emotions of their predicament.
Moreover, the play of the child's mind,
which turns the almanac into a bird, lets
the stove and the almanac speak, and
draws its own version of the child's world,
provides a distinctive way of being
effectual-of, as some might say, "dealing
with things." Like many a young
protagonist, the child is a hero, or at least
a hero-in-waiting, exerting himself or
herself to transform the world. Yet, one
must not entertain Romantic delusions
that art might offer salvation. After all, the
child's drawing depicts a "rigid house" and
tears falling into a flower bed; in its final
speech, the almanac-that voice of the
inevitable-interprets: "Time to plant tears."
Going a step further, the voice of the
author, with its considerable emotional
distance, ensures that this story does not
become maudlin. Indeed, when listened
to, when one takes the author's
playfulness into account, "Sestina" is a

Elizabeth Bishop
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911
October 6, 1979) was an American poet
and short-story writer. She was the Poet
Laureate of the United Statesfrom 1949 to
1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry
in 1956,[1] the National Book
Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of
the Neustadt International Prize for
Literature in 1976 .[2]
Elizabeth Bishop, an only child, was born
in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her
father, a successful builder, died when she
was eight months old, Bishops mother
became mentally ill and was
institutionalized in 1916. (Bishop would

very busy story that features not only the

woman and the child but also the stove,
the almanac, and the images in the
drawing, defiant little antagonists or
symbols of what can never be said
directly.
Geography played a central role in
Bishop's life and imagination. Geography
and travel stimulated her. She traveled
often but made her home in Florida and
Brazil long enough to absorb those
settings and write of them repeatedly. She
wrote both stories and poems about Nova
Scotia, where she spent part of her
earliest years. Throughout her work, there
is the sense of the power of "the interior"often a region, but in "Sestina" a domestic
scene. Bishop could write of places as
though looking from afar, like a tourist, but
she rewarded-and surprised-her readers
with affecting insights that the places
yielded. As she writes in "The Map," the
poem that opens her first book, "Mapped
waters are more quiet than the land is."

later write about the time of her mother's

struggles in her short story "In The
Village.")[3] Effectively orphaned during
her very early childhood, she lived with
her grandparents on a farm in Great
Village, Nova Scotia, a period she also
referenced in her writing. Bishop's mother
remained in an asylum until her death in
1934, and the two were never reunited.[4]
Later in childhood, Bishop's paternal
family gained custody. She was removed
from the care of her grandparents and
moved in with her father's wealthier family
in Worcester, Massachusetts. However,
Bishop was unhappy there, and her
separation from her maternal
grandparents made her lonely. While she
was living in Worcester, she developed
chronic asthma, from which she suffered
for the rest of her life.[3] Her time in
Worcester is briefly chronicled in her poem

"In The Waiting Room." In 1918, her

grandparents, realizing that Bishop was
unhappy living with them, sent her to live
with her mother's oldest sister, Maud
Boomer Shepherdson, and her husband
George. The Bishops paid Maud to house
and educate their granddaughter. The
Shepherdsons lived in atenement in an
impoverished Revere,
Massachusetts neighborhood populated
mostly by Irish and Italian immigrants. The
family later moved to better
circumstances in Cliftondale,
Massachusetts. It was Bishop's aunt who
introduced her to the works of Victorian
poets, including Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Robert
Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
[5]
Bishop was very ill as a child and, as a
result, received very little formal
schooling. She attended Saugus High
School for her freshman year. She was
accepted to the Walnut Hill
School in Natick, Massachusetts for her
sophomore year but was behind on her
immunizations and not allowed to attend.
She instead spent the year at the North
Shore Country Day School in Swampscott,
Massachusetts.[5] Bishop then boarded at
the Walnut Hill School, where she studied
music.[3] At the school her first poems
were published by her friend Frani Blough
in a student magazine.[6]Then she
entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929,
shortly before the stock market crash,
planning to be a composer. She gave up
music because of a terror of performance
and switched to English where she took
courses including 16th and 17th century
literature and the novel.[3] Bishop
published her work in her senior year
in The Magazine (based in California).[3] In
1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a
rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with
writer Mary McCarthy (one year her
senior), Margaret Miller, and the sisters

Eunice and Eleanor Clark.[7] Bishop

graduated in 1934.
Influences[edit]
Bishop was greatly influenced by the
poet Marianne Moore,[8] to whom she was
introduced by a librarian at Vassar in
1934. Moore took a keen interest in
Bishops work and, at one point, Moore
dissuaded Bishop from attending Cornell
Medical School, where the poet had briefly
enrolled herself after moving toNew York
City following her Vassar graduation.
Regarding Moore's influence on Bishop's
writing, Bishop's friend and Vassar peer,
the writer Mary McCarthystated, "Certainly
between Bishop and Marianne Moore there
are resemblances: the sort of close
microscopic inspection of certain parts of
experience. [However,] I think there is
something a bit too demure about
Marianne Moore, and there's nothing
demure about Elizabeth Bishop."[9] Moore
helped Bishop first publish some of her
poems in an anthology called Trial
Balances in which established poets
introduced the work of unknown, younger
poets.[9]
It was four years before Bishop addressed
"Dear Miss Moore" as "Dear Marianne" and
only then at the elder poets invitation.
The friendship between the two women,
memorialized by an extensive
correspondence (see One Art), endured
until Moore's death in 1972. Bishop's "At
the Fishhouses" (1955) contains allusions
on several levels to Moore's 1924 poem "A
Grave."[10]
She was introduced to Robert
Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947, and they
became great friends, mostly through
their written correspondence, until
Lowell's death in 1977. After his death,
she wrote, "our friendship, [which was]
often kept alive through years of
separation only by letters, remained

constant and affectionate, and I shall

always be deeply grateful for it."[11] They
also influenced each other's poetry. Lowell
cited Bishop's influence on his poem
"Skunk Hour" which he said, "[was]
modeled on Miss Bishop's 'The
Armadillo.'"[12] Also, his poem "The
Scream" is "derived from...Bishop's
story In the Village."[13] "North Haven,"
one of the last poems she published
during her lifetime, was written in memory
of Lowell in 1978.
Travels[edit]
Bishop had an independent income in
early adulthood as a result of an
inheritance from her deceased father that
did not run out until the end of her life.
[3] With this inheritance, Bishop was able
to travel widely without worrying about
employment and lived in many cities and
countries which are described in her
poems.[14] She wrote frequently about
her love of travel in poems like "Questions
of Travel" and "Over 2000 Illustrations and
a Complete Concordance." She lived in
France for several years in the mid-1930s
with a friend she knew at Vassar, Louise
Crane, who was a paper-manufacturing
heiress. In 1938, Bishop purchased a
house with Crane at 624 White Street
in Key West, Florida. While living there
Bishop made the acquaintance of Pauline
Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had
divorced Ernest Hemingway in 1940.
From 1949 to 1950, she was the
Consultant in Poetry for the Library of
Congress, and lived at Bertha Looker's
Boardinghouse, 1312 30th
Street Northwest, Washington, D.C.,
in Georgetown.[15]
Upon receiving a substantial $2,500
traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr
College in 1951, Bishop set off to
circumnavigate South America by boat.
Arriving inSantos, Brazil in November of

that year, Bishop expected to stay two

weeks but stayed 15 years. She lived in
Petrpolis with architect Lota de Macedo
Soares, descended from a prominent and
notable political family.[16] Although
Bishop was not forthcoming about details
of her romance with Soares, much of their
relationship was documented in Bishop's
extensive correspondence with Samuel
Ashley Brown. However, in its later years,
the relationship deteriorated, becoming
volatile and tempestuous, marked by
bouts of depression, tantrums and
alcoholism.[17]
During her time in Brazil Elizabeth Bishop
became increasingly interested in the
languages and literatures of Latin
America.[18] She was influenced by South
and Central American poets, including
the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, as well as
the Brazilian poets Joo Cabral de Melo
Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade,
and translated their work into English.
Regarding de Andrade, she said, "I didn't
know him at all. He's supposed to be very
shy. I'm supposed to be very shy. We've
met once on the sidewalk at night. We
had just come out of the same restaurant,
and he kissed my hand politely when we
were introduced."[19] After Soares took
her own life in 1967, Bishop spent more
time in the US.[20][21]
Publication history and awards[edit]
For a major American poet, Bishop
published very sparingly. Her first
book, North & South was first published in
1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Prize
for poetry. This book included important
poems like "The Man-Moth" (which
describes a dark and lonely fictional
creature inspired by what Bishop noted
was "[a] newspaper misprint for
'mammoth'") and "The Fish" (in which
Bishop describes a caught fish in exacting
detail). But she didn't publish a follow up
until nine years later. That volume,

titled Poems: North and SouthA Cold

Spring, first published in 1955, included
her first book, plus the 18 new poems that
constituted the new "Cold Spring" section.
Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for this book
in 1956.
Then there was another long wait before
Bishop published her next
volume, Questions of Travel, in 1965. This
book showed the influence that living in
Brazil had had on Bishop's writing. It
included poems in the book's first section
that were explicitly about life in Brazil
including "Arrival at Santos,"
"Manuelzinho," and "The Riverman." But in
the second section of the volume Bishop
also included pieces set in other locations
like "In the Village" and "First Death in
Nova Scotia" which take place in her
native country. Questions of Travel was her
first book to include one of her short
stories (the aforementioned "In the
Village").
Bishop's next major publication was The
Complete Poems (1969) which included
eight new poems and won a National Book
Award. Then she published the last new
book of poems that she would publish in
her lifetime, Geography III (1977) which
included frequently anthologized poems
like "In the Waiting Room" and "One Art."
The book won Bishop the Neustadt
International Prize for Literature. She was
the first woman to receive the Neustadt
International Prize for Literature and
remains the only American to have won
that prize.[22]
Bishop's The Complete Poems, 19271979 was published posthumously in
1983. Other posthumous publications
included The Collected Prose (1984),
which included her essays and short
stories, and Edgar Allan Poe & the Jukebox: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and
Fragments (2006) which courted some
controversy upon publication. Meghan

O'Rourke notes, in an article

from Slatemagazine, "It's no wonder ...
that the recent publication of Bishop's
hitherto uncollected poems, drafts, and
fragments ... encountered fierce
resistance, and some debate about the
value of making this work available to the
public. In an outraged piece for The New
Republic, Helen Vendler labeled the drafts
'maimed and stunted' and rebuked Farrar,
Straus and Giroux for choosing to publish
the volume."[23]
Literary style and identity[edit]
Bishop did not see herself as a "lesbian
poet" or as a "female poet." In part,
because Bishop refused to have her work
published in all-female poetry anthologies,
other female poets involved with the
women's movement thought she was
hostile to the movement. For instance, a
student at Harvard who was close to
Bishop in the 60s, Kathleen Spivack, wrote
in her memoir, "I think Bishop internalized
the misogyny of the time. How could she
not? ... Bishop had a very ambivalent
relation to being a woman plus poetplus
lesbianin the Boston/Cambridge/Harvard
nexus ... Extremely vulnerable, sensitive,
she hid much of her private life. She
wanted nothing to do with anything that
seemed to involve the women's
movement. She internalized many of the
male attitudes of the day toward women,
who were supposed to be attractive,
appealing to men, and not ask for equal
pay or a job with benefits."[24] However,
this was not how Bishop necessarily
viewed herself. In an interview with The
Paris Review from 1978, she said that,
despite her insistence on being excluded
from female poetry anthologies, she still
considered herself to be "a strong
feminist" but that she only wanted to be
judged based on the quality of her writing
and not on her gender or sexual
orientation.[3][25]

Where some of her notable

contemporaries like Robert
Lowell and John Berryman made the
intimate details of their personal lives an
important part of their poetry, Bishop
avoided this practice altogether.[26] In
contrast to this confessional style
involving large amounts of self-exposure,
Bishop's style of writing, though it
sometimes involved sparse details from
her personal life, was known for its highly
detailed and objective, distant point of
view and for its reticence on the personal
subject matter that the work of her
contemporaries involved. And when
Bishop wrote about details and people
from her own life (as she did in her story
about her childhood and her mentally
unstable mother in "In the Village"), she
used discretion. For instance, she wrote
the story "In the Village" as a third person
narrative. By using this point of view, the
reader would only know of the story's
autobiographical origins if the reader knew
about Bishop's childhood.[27]
Although she was generally supportive of
the "confessional" style of her friend,
Robert Lowell, she drew the line at
Lowell's highly controversial book The
Dolphin (1973), in which he used and
altered private letters from his exwife, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom he'd
recently divorced after 23 years of
marriage), as material for his poems. In a
letter to Lowell, dated March 21, 1972,
Bishop strongly urged him against
publishing the book, writing, "One can use
one's life as material [for poems]one
does anywaybut these lettersaren't

you violating a trust? IF you were given

permissionIF you hadn't changed
them ... etc. But art just isn't worth that
much."[28]
Later career[edit]
Bishop lectured in higher education for a
number of years starting in the 1970s
when her inheritance began to run out.
[29] For a short time she taught at
the University of Washington, before
teaching at Harvard University for seven
years. She often spent her summers in her
summer house in the island community
of North Haven, Maine. She taught at New
York University, before finishing at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She commented, "I dont think I believe in
writing courses at all Its true, children
sometimes write wonderful things, paint
wonderful pictures, but I think they should
be discouraged."[3]
In 1971 Bishop began a relationship with
Alice Methfessel.[30] Never a prolific
writer, Bishop noted that she would begin
many projects and leave them unfinished.
Two years after publishing her last
book, Geography III (1977),[3] she died of
a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at
Lewis Wharf, Boston. She is buried in Hope
Cemetery in Worcester, Massachusetts.
[31] Alice Methfessel was her literary
executor.[30] After her death,
the Elizabeth Bishop House, an artists'
retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia, was
dedicated to her memory.