20 pages • 40 minutes read
Sestina
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Correspondence that Elizabeth Bishop maintained with poet Marianne Moore reveals that the working title of this poem was “Early Sorrow,” a reference to Bishop’s childhood in Canada. Bishop’s later decision to use the title to focus on the poem’s form rather than its subject suggests the form’s importance.
First developed by traveling troubadours in 12th-century France, who found the repeating word pattern helpful in memorizing long ballads, a sestina is made up of six unrhymed, six-line stanzas (called sestets) and closes with a tercet, a three-line envoi, French for “a sending off.” The sestina form enjoyed a renaissance with the early-20th-century Modernists, most notably T. S. Eliot, whom Bishop admired, and their efforts to reanimate poetry by reviving arcane forms.
The sestina is a complicated pattern of echoed words. In it, the words that conclude the six lines of the opening sestet—in this case, “house,” “grandmother,” “child,” “stove,” “almanac,” and “tears”—are also the closing words of all the lines that follow, save in different order. The closing envoi contains all six words, two per line.
However, the intricate patterning is more than pattern for pattern’s sake; form is theme (See: Further Reading & Resources). For Bishop, the sestina, with its repetitive, cyclical pattern, suggests the emotional state of the grandmother and the child. They are, for now, locked into handling their emotional trauma through fixed behaviors, with the grandmother puttering about the kitchen and the child drawing crayon pictures.
Enjambment
Drawing on the experiences and memories of the twin tragedies of her parents that framed her childhood (See: Poet Biography), Bishop uses the poetic device known as enjambment to suggest the dark power of grief to last.
Poets use end punctation to close off thoughts. Commas, semicolons, or sometimes even periods provide poems with regular breakpoints, pauses that then become an element of recitation. Enjambment, however, is just the opposite. Lines move one into the next without pause, without breaks, and without end-mark punctation. Recitation depends on allowing lines to flow one into the next without any pauses.
Bishop uses enjambment to suggest the emotional dilemma of the grandmother and the child. Many lines are continued to the next line in a movement that suggests ongoing relentless motion. Like grief itself and the trauma of loss, the poetic lines themselves refuse stops. By not relying on regular end-stops, enjambment creates a complex momentum and fluid movement. It allows for creative recitation and a fluid, conversational delivery that avoids singsong-y delivery and creates more of an immersive experience that puts the focus on the quiet, unending sadness of the grandmother and the child.
Personification and Anthropomorphism
If biography is admitted as a subtext of the poem—that is, an adult Bishop looking back at the trauma of her father’s death when she was a young child—the poem is nevertheless remarkably alive.
While set in the early days of autumn when nature concedes to the slow arc of winter and in the “failing light” (Line 2) of late afternoon when daylight slowly surrenders to the darkness, the poem uses personification to counter that oppressive feeling of death and sadness. Even if the grandmother and the child move very little (the grandmother slices bread, and the child draws at the kitchen table), objects all around the kitchen are dynamic and energetic.
Personification allows the poet to gift inanimate objects with human attributes and abilities. The tea kettle “sings” (Line 11) and even cries “small hard tears” (Line 14); the rain dances on the roof; the tea sobs “dark brown tears” (Line 22); and the moons that decorate the borders of the almanac’s pages fall gently, “like tears” (Line 33), into the child’s drawing.
If personification is the mere description of nonhuman entities as having human characteristics, anthropomorphism goes a step further and depicts such objects as behaving consciously like humans. This occurs when the stove says, “It was to be” (Line 25); when the almanac assures the grandmother that it knows what will happen; and when the almanac again states that it is “[t]ime to plant tears” (Line 37). In this way, under Bishop’s touch, the kitchen becomes magical and alive.
Using personification and anthropomorphism, then, the poet herself becomes a grown-up avatar of the artist-in-waiting, the child drawing her own magical figures at the kitchen table. Bishop endows the kitchen with life. Using the magic of figurative language, the poet celebrates the sweet urgency to live despite the emotional drama of the two sad and lonely characters too focused on grief. However, Bishop refuses to give sadness the final word. In the envoi, the grandmother and the child reflect that vitality in the poem’s slender promise of hope: The grandmother, tired of crying and sighing, at last sings, and the child, confident in her art, begins a new drawing.
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By Elizabeth Bishop
