Elizabeth Bishop "Sestina"

Elizabeth Bishop poem titled “Sestina” is fascinating since the title and form of the poetry are identical. A sestina is “a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet for a total of thirty-nine lines” (Wikipedia.com). However, Bishop did not follow through with the sestina in her last stanza where she cut is short and changed the order of the ending words. Taking a close look at the poem, it is important to notice that the last word of every line in the first stanza is “house”, “grandmother”, “child”, “stove”, “almanac” and “tears”. Those exact words are used over and over again as the last word of every line, except the last stanza.
The reason for Elizabeth Bishop’s decision to title her poem after the form it was written in was to provide the reader with an understanding of how a child sees the world. A child rearranges things until everything makes sense, which in turn is the way the words are rearranged over and over again in the poem. The reader is trying to make sense of what is going on, but at the same time, understanding the true meaning of the poem is not the main dilemma here, in my opinion. I believe that Bishop is introducing her readers into a more complex way of writing poetry through depicting a complex and emotional situation between the grandmother and the child. Here Bishop demonstrates her art in its most persuading form, because it surely does persuade the reader to appreciate poetry.
An interesting point which stands out to me is that the sestina keeps folding and unfolding itself through the use of suggestive adjectives, such as “failing light”, “small hard tears”, “rigid house”, “winding path”, “marvelous stove”, “inscrutable house”, which in turn create emotion and make the sestina become alive. Also in Bishop's sestina, tears gracefully transform from the grandmother's literal tears to the sweat on a teakettle and the rain on the roof of the house, the tea in the grandmother's cup, the buttons on the man's shirt that the child adds to her drawing, and the little moons printed on the pages of the almanac. These techniques are not only producing great poetry, but they are also initiating intellectual writing filled with metaphors and imaginative language.