‘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 father—has died or left. Certainly, the grief is serious, for the final three lines indicate hat 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 spectre 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 ‘First Death in Nova Scotia,’ a child figures prominently, providing a persona through which the mature poet presents the past. The use of the third person voice in ‘Sestina’ 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 Essay on Elizabeth bishop sestina
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” is a captivating poem filled with depictions that take the reader to the valleys of sadness and unresolved grief. The poem symbolizes the dynamics of an ongoing life as well as the powers of memory and an unsettled sense of loss. Beyond presenting sadness, the poem conveys the inter-generational challenges posed by a sense of loss and unresolved grief. The writer draws ...
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 re-enact 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.
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 Provencal 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. 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 watercolours).
In addition, this poem often sounds like prose: the use of dialogue, for example, and the long, careful sentence comprising the sixth
The Essay on The Bells Words Stanza Poem
The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe The Bells is one of Poe's famous poems, in which Poe tries to make the bells sound real. He tries to make the sounds by using words instead of sound, which is really annoying when you read it, because he repeats things so often in the poem. He uses words like shrieking and twinkling. In every stanza he talks about different bells, and what noises they make, and for ...
