Sestina

A forbidding coldness hangs about the poem. It is early autumn, in the “failing light” (Line 2) of late afternoon. It is dreary, rainy, and chilly, which defies both the freshly brewed tea and the wood stove’s attempts to make the kitchen warm and cozy. More unsettling, the grandmother, even as she prepares the late afternoon tea for her granddaughter, holds back tears and hides from the child the raw emotions that move her to sorrow. That the poem never shares with the reader the cause of the grandmother’s emotional pain gives it the deeper chill of a mystery.

The poem reflects Elizabeth Bishop’s grounding in classical music composition, as it is crafted in contrapuntal movement. In contrapuntal music, most familiar to contemporary audiences through the intricate keyboard exercises of Johann Sebastian Bach (whom Bishop much admired), two contrasting melodies are set against each other, usually in staggered simultaneity—the left hand plays one, and the right hand plays the other. In juxtaposing two melodies that are otherwise only loosely related, the composition creates an unexpected harmony and cooperation between two separate melodies.

The grandmother dominates the first four stanzas and creates the poem’s forbidding chill. She is caught within her pretense; her hidden sadness separates her from the girl and keeps the kitchen chilly despite her forced laughter and her obvious love for the child. Even as she reads funny anecdotes from the almanac and keeps up a brave front for the child, something bothers her that she believes she can and must protect her granddaughter from (See: Further Reading & Resources). Like the child, the reader cannot understand the grandmother’s efforts but nevertheless feels the chill.

In these early stanzas, then, that chilling sense of isolation defines the relationship between the two characters and between the characters and the readers. Until the tipping point moment in Stanza 5 when the poem’s focus shifts to the child busy with her crayons, the poem emphasizes loneliness and emotional distance.

Stanza 5 changes the poem’s free-floating melancholy. Like the rain outside or the descent of night or the arrival of autumn, the poem suggests that whatever tragedy the grandmother (and the child) have survived is an expression of the real-time world, a combination of bad luck or surprise or misfortune, that will not be the last word. Until the child at the table enters the poem more fully, the only solution appears to be the grandmother’s: Retreat from the hard reality of events and pretend that such terrors can be contained and directed by ignoring them or by pretending that they can be expected, even anticipated. Put faith in the logic of the almanac, the grandmother suggests, with its predictions of everything from crop returns to relationship success through the manipulation of star charts.

In Stanza 5, Line 27, the poem’s rich countermelody quietly begins. The almanac gives way to the crayon drawing, the grandmother concedes the poem’s center to the child, and, in the process, accommodation and sorrow give way to creativity and joy. Grief will not be the last word. Autumn, night, and rainy weather will not and cannot endure.

In these closing two stanzas, “Sestina” becomes a variation of a literary genre known as a künstlerroman, the story of the early stirrings of an artist. When the focus shifts to the child drawing, the kitchen comes alive with a kind of magical animation. The child creates with her crayons what has been lost to her there in her grandmother’s house: a home with a tidy garden and a winding pathway inviting everyone to the front door. The drawing is cheerful and inviting. The man she creates has coat buttons that look like tears. They are not tears like the ones her grandmother holds back; they look “like” (Line 29) tears. They are created images, crafted by the careful hand of the artist-child.

In Line 30, the child shows off her work proudly to her tearful grandmother. At first read, the child’s pride seems to reflect how little she understands of the grief that has upset the grandmother, but there is radiant magic to Stanza 6. The moons that decorate the borders of the pages of the almanac drop from the pages of the booklet itself and fall down into the child’s crayon garden. The almanac concedes to the child’s drawing—reality to the imagination, mystery to magic.

The envoi, the closing tercet, clarifies the poem’s solution. The countermovement to reality’s dark events is creativity and art itself: “Time to plant tears” (Line 37), says the now magical almanac as it embraces the defiance of sorrow through creativity itself. Sorrows now promise future growth like seeds that promise flowers. The poem closes with both characters embracing their inner artists: The grandmother sings to the now “marvelous” (Line 38) stove, and the child proudly draws a new “inscrutable” (Line 39) picture, both adjectives suggesting the undefinable magic of art itself.

The poem becomes the narrative of how an artist is born. The child, naive and still capable of wonder but puzzled by dark circumstances that will never explain themselves, turns intuitively to creating something original, something beautiful, and something to be proud of.

The poem concedes that there is nothing to be done about the hard realities of life—the agonies and ironies, the sorrows and disappointments—save creating against them, amid them, and even with them the stuff of enduring art. Despite the grandmother’s loving efforts in the opening four stanzas, those dark circumstances cannot be ignored or remedied through hot tea and warm bread and cannot be anticipated. The grandmother and the child are vulnerable, terrorized by the unnamed something that hangs about just outside the kitchen.

Bishop, herself an accomplished poet, painter, and musician, offers the tender hope that art has always offered to a troubled and confused humanity. The poem, with its disciplined and sculpted lines, is itself the beautiful promise of the tears that fall into the child’s crayon garden. Crafted from the unhappy materials of Bishop’s own childhood, “Sestina” offers the consolation of art—the creativity that the child just begins to discover there at the kitchen table.