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

‘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 […]

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