Analysis About Elizabeth Bishop S Sestina

Analysis about Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina
Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most important poets in 20th century in United States. Raised in a poor childhood and deeply influenced, she wrote poems mysterious as well as profound. Instead of useless self-obsession or empty emotions, she focuses on the precise description about objective world and the reflection of the meaning of life, mapping a cruel but real world in her works.
Sestina is one of Elizabeth’s old-age poems, where she talked about the root of her homeless feeling. And from the very moment, she gradually realized that the home of her childhood had gone forever, and could not be replaced by anything else.
In her poem "Sestina", Elizabeth Bishop constructed a haunting picture of the interactions between a grandmother and a granddaughter on a gloomy autumn evening. The poem epitomizes the way that family members share long-buried and unarticulated sorrows, simultaneously hiding and revealing what they know of themselves and of each other. The title, "Sestina," appears to simply identify the poetic form that Bishop chose for her story: the sestina is a complex, interwoven structure of six stanzas, wherein six end-words repeat themselves in a set pattern. Reading this poem, however, we do not experience it as a display of cold or abstract mechanics. Instead, it is raw and deeply emotional, for all that the empirical details of the underlying sorrow (what it is actually "about") are concealed from the reader. We "understand" the sadness without "knowing" its source.
Stanza 1 begins in a domestic scene as a grandmother reads jokes from an almanac to her granddaughter. However, grief is suggested by the Autumnal atmosphere and the “failing light “. This is made explicit by the description of the grandmother “laughing and talking to hide her tears.”
Stanza 2 chronicles the grandmother’s supersticious thoughts as the almanac, she believes, “foretold” the tragedy which has engulfed the house. It is suggested that this grief is “only known to a grandmother” because it is not equipped to mourn the loss of her parents because she is too innocent to comprehend it. The sense of grief seeps through the child’s innocence, which is unable to protect her from it, and this is emphasised by Bishop’s personification of the kettle. “the teakettle’s small hard tears Dance like mad on the hot black stove” Darkness is, again, evident in this description and the rain, which was “falling“ in stanza 1, is now more violent and threatening. The almanac takes on a sinister quality in the simile used to describe it in
In stanza 4, “Birdlike, the almanac Hovers above the child”. This reminds us of the hungry loon in “First Death in Nova Scotia”. It is obvious that we are seeing things from a child’s point of view here. This is evident in the metaphorical description of the grandmother’s tears, “her teacup full of dark brown tears”. Grief is ready to engulf the child. Her innocence cannot protect her indefinitely.
In stanza 5, Bishop personifies the “Marvel stove” and the “almanac2 as they discuss the child’s loss in impersonal terms. This is, again, evidence of the child’s point of view. The child tries to escape from the grief which surrounds her by drawing a house and a man, generally supposed to represent her dead Father. However, the man’s buttons are like “tears”. Grief, once again, looms large.
The final two stanzas are surreal as they describe how reality contaminates the child’s fantastic imaginary world. The “little moons” fall into the flower bed which the child has drawn. It is suggested that her life will be tainted with tears once she is old enough to understand her grief.
Critics agree that this is a highly Autobiographical poem which deals with the period after Bishop’s Mother was institutionalised permanently due to mental illness and she went to live with her Maternal grandmother. Once again, the child’s sense of loss is evoked through the poem’s atmosphere and its detailed presentation of the physical objects in the kitchen where the poem is set.
This tension that the poem produces in readers between understanding Bishop’s emotion and knowing the story is intriguing; why does "Sestina" make us understand what we cannot know? Examining the form of this text reveals an exciting possibility: that Bishop used the sestina form itself to explore the powerful feelings that we have around the issue of heredity, especially regarding inherited diseases like mental illness. Her choice of form is significant not only because of the sestina's intrinsic references to repetition and circularity, important ideas in a discussion of heredity, but also because of the form's resemblances to the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, the mechanism of heredity, which had been discovered just a few years before Bishop composed this poem. In "Sestina," poetic form is consonant with the science of genome theory, a consonance that is reinforced through Bishop's images and end-words, revealing the emotional import of one of the key scientific and cultural "discoveries" of our time.

P.S. Thank you professor May for your dedication to this course, I really appreciate your help to me. The inspiration to me not only lies on the understanding of American poetry, but the enthusiasm for poetry you showed us. This made me realize how precious it is to cherish my work and everything I own. My regards