A Summary and Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sestina’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Sestina’ is a poem by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1956. The poem, which uses a very specific verse form, describes a grandmother and a child as they sit in a kitchen together, with a mysterious and unspecific air of grief or sadness haunting them both.

The poem is widely believed to reflect a traumatic event in Bishop’s own childhood, which involved a visit from her mother who had been incarcerated for mental illness. However, we should be wary of reading ‘Sestina’ too narrowly as ‘merely’ a work of autobiography.

Summary

It’s easy enough to describe the domestic scene in which the poem takes place: a grandmother and a child sit in a kitchen one September (hence the grandmother’s ‘equinoctial tears’, suggesting the autumn equinox), as rain falls outside. They read jokes from an almanac and laugh and talk to each other, although we’re not told what they talk about.

The grandmother performs ordinary domestic chores, drinking tea and cutting bread, and the child draws some drawings with crayons, drawing a house with a ‘winding pathway’ and adding in the figure of a man. The child also draws a picture of a garden, and then another picture of a house.

However, a shadow of unspoken grief hangs over all of these activities. The grandmother hides tears, and the almanac seems to hold foreboding, if unspoken, knowledge. The poem ends with the enigmatic statement, ‘Time to plant tears, says the almanac.’

Analysis

It is easier to describe the physical actions of the grandmother and child than it is to interpret what they mean. Elizabeth Bishop leaves much for us to infer, and although we may be led to assume a number of details, that’s exactly what they remain: assumptions, rather than established facts.

For instance, we might assume that the grandmother and the child are related: the child is either her granddaughter or grandson. (Note we never even learn the gender of the child, who remains indeterminate: either a boy or a girl.) We might also venture to speculate that the child may be a girl, given the poem’s origins in Bishop’s own childhood. But this is itself an assumption, and it’s worth noting the poet’s refusal to use specific pronouns in relation to the child in the poem.

If we do assume the child is the granddaughter or grandson of the grandmother, this may lead us to wonder: where are the child’s parents? Are they both dead? Is the mother locked away for her own safety and as a result of her mental illness, as with Bishop’s own mother?

Is this the reason the child is alone with the grandmother and there’s no mention of anyone else: could the grandmother have assumed the role of parent to the child in the poem? Or is the child merely visiting the grandmother while their parents are away? The child draws several pictures of houses, including one ‘inscrutable house’. In other words, it’s mysterious. But inscrutable to whom?

Certainly to us: the adjective ‘inscrutable’ leads us off down the garden path of interpretive speculation, much like that ‘winding pathway’ which accompanies the first drawing of a house. But is it also inscrutable or mysterious to the grandmother, who cannot understand why the child keeps drawing such a thing? Or to the child themselves, who cannot envision a ‘house’ or home like other children’s, given the absence of their mother and father?

And then there’s the ‘man with buttons like tears’ which the child draws, almost as an afterthought, adding him to the house picture. Is this the child’s father? And does the child consciously draw his buttons as tear-shaped, or is this some unconscious and unspoken nod to the grief the child is experiencing, but unable to voice or confront directly? Again, note the lack of dialogue from the poem: although we’re told the grandmother engages in ‘talking’ with the child, we never learn what either of them says.

Instead, the child is trying to transmute their unspoken and suppressed suffering into art, much as Bishop is (arguably) doing with the poem itself. Indeed, the ‘rigid’ house which the child draws mirrors the rigidity of the sestina form (of which more in a moment).

Themes

The theme of loss, and the feeling of grief which attends such loss, is central to the emotional power of ‘Sestina’. If we assume that the mood of grief is strongly if ambiguously summoned by the poem, it seems fair to argue that Bishop is exploring the impact of loss on a child and the challenges of navigating grief.

Of course, if the child has lost their parents, then presumably (again, an assumption, but a reasonable one) one of those parents, the father or the mother, was themselves the child of the grandmother. The grandmother’s hidden tears suggest an unspoken sorrow that burdens her and potentially influences the child’s understanding of the world.

Time is another important theme in the poem. The cyclical nature of time is emphasized through the repetition of words and the almanac’s predictions. (An almanac is an annual calendar containing important dates and statistical information such as astronomical data.) The poem suggests that the past shapes the present and that grief can persist, despite our best attempts to hide it.

At the same time, however, the poem is also about change, and how a change in our lives – the loss of someone we hold dear, perhaps – can continue to haunt our present. Things change, but some things – September, or the annual forecasts of the almanac, among other things – always come round again. There’s something reassuring to the grandmother, we sense, in the almanac’s supposed ability to tell the future: everything is already ordained and someone or something else is in control of it.

It is also worth considering whether there is a mismatch between the child’s view of the world and the grandmother’s. The grandmother sets much store by the almanac, believing it can foretell future events, while the child seems content to draw pictures of houses which the grandmother appears to find ‘inscrutable’. There’s a possibility that the child’s innocent view of the world and the mother’s more experienced perspective are at odds with each other.

Form

The poem’s title helpfully explains the form that Bishop is using: the sestina. It is a poem of sixes: six stanzas, each comprising six lines (also known as sestets but known sometimes as ‘sixains’: like ‘quatrains’ but with six instead of four lines), with a final tercet – a concluding ‘envoi’ – bringing the whole poem to a close. So, 39 lines in total, using just six different end-words as the ‘rhymes’.

The same six words (‘house’, ‘grandmother’, ‘child’, ‘stove’, ‘almanac’, and ‘tears’) are repeated at the ends of the lines of each stanza, although in a different order in each stanza. (There’s a very particular order the words have to be arranged into, which we explain in a separate post.)

The effect of these repeated words is one of claustrophobia: the same six words come at us seven times in total (once in each of the six stanzas, and then again in the concluding tercet, or three-line stanza), generating a feeling of being trapped in an oppressive domestic environment (the stove, the house) with the same person (grandmother, child) while the cycle of the year rolls round again and again (almanac) creating grief and unhappiness (tears).

The verse form, in other words, is as restrictive and enclosed as that kitchen in which the ‘action’ of the poem takes place. But the repetitive, cyclical nature of the sestina – always coming back to those six key words – reflects the poem’s broader focus on the cyclical nature of life, with the almanac, the seemingly incessant rain, and the constant presence of ‘tears’.

Final Thoughts

Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sestina’ is a complex and elliptical poem that explores the complexities of grief, memory, and communication. The poem’s ambiguity is deliberate, and leaves the poem’s meaning open to multiple interpretations.