Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'Sestina' is from her 1965 collection Questions of Travel. Atypically, it draws on biographical details of Bishop's early childhood and takes its place in her 1965 collection alongside two other 'childhood' poems - 'Manners' and 'First Death in Nova Scotia'. Bishop characteristically avoided drawing on autobiographical material as direct subject matter for her poetry, placing her work in contrast with the 'confessional' poetry in vogue at the time. While Bishop would include autobiographical elements in her work, these details would be handled with reticence and a mindful distancing. Often, Bishop would transmute the personal into descriptions of the world around her, resulting in poetry of exquisite physical description.
Childhood
Elizabeth Bishop had an unhappy childhood; her father died before she was a year old, shortly after his death her mother suffered a mental breakdown leaving Elizabeth with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, before being moved to her father's relatives in Massachusetts. Bishop wrote in the 1960s "Although I think I have a prize 'unhappy childhood', almost good enough for the text-books - please don't think I dote on it" (cited in Heaney, 164). The phrase sums up both Bishop's childhood and her stoicism. This stoicism of character becomes a form of reticence in the poetry. Even when Bishop drew on direct childhood experience (and this was partially due to the example of Robert Lowell) for the selection of poems that include 'Sestina' her poetry eschewed the confessional approach. Bishop's reticence and discretion ensured that the resultant poems had a life adrift from the biographical context of the author.
The sestina
The sestina is an exact and intricate form. It consists of six stanzas, each of six lines, and completed by an envoi of three lines. Each stanza employs the same six end-words which recur in a different set order in each stanza. Each of the six-end words must be used in the concluding envoi. While the sestina is unrhymed, much of the function of rhyme is compensated for by the repetition of the end-words throughout the poem. Elizabeth Bishop produced two published sestinas (her earliest, 'A Miracle for Breakfast', appeared in North & South, from 1946) of which 'Sestina' is the second.
The first three stanzas
In 'Sestina' the end-words employed are 'house, 'grandmother', 'child', 'stove', 'almanac' and 'tears'. A domestic interior is invoked, rain falls as a grandmother and small child occupy themselves beside a stove in the kitchen. The rain finds its mirror in the grandmother's tears in the first stanza ('laughing and talking to hide her tears'), while in the second stanza the grandmother articulates the deterministic sense that pervades the poem as a whole, 'She thinks that her equinoctial tears / and the rain that beats on the roof of the house / ... were both foretold by the almanac').
As the grandmother busies herself about the stove it becomes apparent that a major theme of 'Sestina' is the repression of hidden pain. In the third stanza, the grandmother addresses the child but is ignored as the child's attention is diverted watching 'the teakettle's small hard tears / dance like mad on the hot black stove...' Throughout 'Sestina' the tears, having been hidden and repressed, keep reappearing in displaced forms. They are transformed throughout the poem into: rain which falls on the house, water steaming around the kettle, tea in the teacup ('dark brown tears'), buttons in a child's drawing ('a man with buttons like tears') and moons in an almanac.
The fourth stanza
The fourth stanza emphasizes the sense that everything in the situation is predetermined. The almanac becomes emblematic of a fate that 'hovers half open above the child, / hovers above the old grandmother / and her teacup full of dark brown tears.' 'Sestina', as Seamus Heaney has pointed out, has an immediate emotional appeal, as direct as a fairy tale (Heaney, 170). It partakes of a number of the genre's darker elements, such as the ultimate inescapability of fate, and the fairy-tale influence is also apparent in the poem's pervasive anthropomorphism. These elements move more strongly to the fore as the poem progresses; or rather, as the poem moves through stanzas, as a sestina doesn't so much progress as become more deeply layered. The sestina form is often taken, by the nature of its repetitions, as displaying the interconnected nature of the world. While it allows for elaborations on a limited theme, in this instance the repetitions add to a slightly dark and claustrophobic tone, as the repetition of domestic end-words become increasingly less comforting and draw attention to the more disconcerting 'tears'.
The fifth stanza and the envoi
'It was to be, says the Marvel Stove. / I know what I know, says the almanac.' Stanza five opens with these statements of calm foreboding, the domestic interior now blurring into Hans Christian Andersen. In this stanza the child draws a picture of a house and pathway, then adding '... a man with buttons like tears' before showing it to the grandmother. The opening of the stanza serves to enforce the feeling that this picture, as with the recurrent tears, represents a real figure whose absence lies at the heart of the poem. It is hard, unusually for an Elizabeth Bishop poem, not to align all of this with the harsh biographical details of the writer's infancy and early childhood.
The fifth stanza has the grandmother again busy about the stove, but now 'the little moons fall down like tears' from the pages of the almanac and land in a flower bed which the child has added to the drawing. The poem's envoi spells out what the moons represent: 'Time to plant tears, says the almanac. / The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove / and the child draws another inscrutable house.' We can note the pun on the 'marvel' stove, which in this case is a literally 'marvellous' one (and it might not be stretching things too far to note the 'man' who is present in the centre of the end-word 'almanac' but missing, along with the absent mother, from the poem itself). While the almanac 'plants tears' in the envoi, the poet has planted her end-words in these final lines in a way which maintains the sense of calm, fated melancholy which pervades 'Sestina'. 'Sestina' gets as close as any of Bishop's poems to allowing sight of the 'tears' of her early life within the poetry.
Sources
Bishop, Elizabeth, Complete Poems, London: Chatto & Windus, 2001 (1991).
Heaney, Seamus, 'Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop' in Heaney, Seamus, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures', London: Faber & Faber, 1995.
You can read more by and about Elizabeth Bishop at the website of The Academy of American Poets.
Ross Moore - Ross Moore reviews fiction and poetry. He lives in Belfast, N. Ireland. You can see examples of his work ...
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