Sestina

The poem “Sestina” examines strategies for handling loss and managing grief. Short of introducing biography into a reading of the poem—Elizabeth Bishop was raised by her grandmother in Nova Scotia after the sudden death of her father and her mother’s subsequent commitment to a psychiatric facility—there is no way to determine exactly what has happened to so traumatize this otherwise quiet moment between a child and her doting grandmother. The grandmother prepares an afternoon tea break while the child proudly creates crayon drawings at the kitchen table.

Bishop creates that sense of loss and grief indirectly. It is early autumn, the season in which nature begins its slow surrender to winter. Rain cloaks the house like a heavy curtain. It is late afternoon, with the day slipping into night, and the grandmother cannot hide her tears. The child, although not as aware as her grandmother, senses sorrow and fixates on how the steam from the tea kettle beads up on the hot stove top like “small hard tears” (14).

In the poem, loss can be felt but not articulated. The grandmother does not want to burden the child, and the child does not have the vocabulary or the experience to put her confusion into words. Rather, the grandmother makes tea and complains about how chilly the house is, and the child draws a picture of what she has inexplicably lost, an inviting home. Thus, the two characters handle grief indirectly as a strategy for surviving the trauma of loss.

There are two ways of reading the relationship between the grandmother and the child. In one reading, the grandmother shuts out the child, refuses to open up, and refuses to bond with the girl. The chilliness she feels in the kitchen reflects her own emotional coolness. Rather than reaching out to the child, the grandmother distracts the girl with drawing paper and crayons, forcing the child to entertain herself, even though the child’s crayon drawing reveals that perhaps she knows more than what her grandmother assumes and needs to talk to someone.

An alternative reading, however, suggests that the stoic silence of the grandmother is her way not of ignoring the girl but of protecting her young granddaughter. She knows the dimensions of the trauma, but she understands that the child has her whole life to come to terms with whatever has left her with her grandmother. The child understands that her parents are not there, but beyond that, she has been protected by the nurturing love of her gentle grandmother. There is time enough, the old woman knows, for the sorrow and confusion of coming to terms with what has happened.