Clues to the True Meaning of “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop

Throughout the poem, Laurie Lee uses personification to relate that the arrival of autumn causes death to different aspects of nature. Lee describes how “slow moves the hour that sucks our life” (Lee 21). She uses personification to compare a prolonged period of time to drawing out death expressing that fall kills everything slowly. Also, Lee explains that “the day hangs fire, taking the village without sound”(Lee 5-6). Lee compares the sun illuminating the village to an assassin quietly killing off its prey. Furthermore, she believes that the sun is overpowering everything when it rises earlier as days shorten. Lastly, Lee uses personification to describe how autumn slowly changes the atmosphere of nature and destroys life as each day passes.

The last line in the poem “and since they were not the ones dead, turned to their own affairs” lacks the emotions the reader would expect a person to feel after a death of a close family member. But instead, it carries a neutral tone which implies that death doesn’t even matter anymore because it happened too often that the value of life became really low, these people are too poor so in order to survive, they must move on so that their lives can continue. A horrible sensory image was presented in the poem when the “saw leaped out at the boy’s hand” and is continued throughout the poem when “the boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh…the hand was gone already…and that ended it”, this shows emphasis to the numbness the child felt. The poem continues with the same cold tone without any expression of emotion or feelings included except for pain, which emphasizes the lack of sympathy given. Not only did the death of this child placed no effect on anyone in the society but he was also immediately forgotten as he has left nothing special enough behind for people to remember him, so “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs”. This proves that life still carries on the same way whether he is present or not, as he is insignificant and that his death

There are clues throughout the poem that express the man’s past experiences, leading him to have a hostile tone. The speaker represents his past as “parched years” that he has lived through (7-8) and represents his daughter’s potential future as

In the final stanza, he makes the reader sad as he assumes the inevitable will happen and she will die. He expresses this through metaphors such as a “black figure in her white cave”, which is a reference to the bright white hospital rooms and although he is the black figure he thinks she just sees a shadow which could be the grim reaper or even death himself, coming to end her journey. No one wants to deal with the sorrow of losing a loved one for good, as

Harwood revolves this poem around change, through the use of a motherly character she is able to construct a life style that has dramatically changed from free to a fairly constricted. Harwood uses the conversations of two people to get this message across, with the conversation discussing life’s progression with an old lover. “But for the grace of God…” suggests that the ex-lover is somewhat thankful for not ending up as a father figure to these children, as he can see the effect it has taken on her from when he used to know her. “Her clothes are out of date” shows her appearance has altered in the bid to live as a mother, her children are now her identity and that is what she will live to be. This poem is revolved around the negativity of losing yourself through mother-hood and the factors that slowly show that it.

The first thing that people read is that the dad has been drinking whiskey. Just from that the reader feels like the father may have some type of drinking problem. Theodore explains in the poem how you can feel faint and light headed if his dad even breathed in his face. As Theodore hangs on to his father like its death itself; while they dance around trying to waltz. Waltzing was not easy for him, as his dad was drunk, and it is hard to follow his steps. Continue reading down to the next paragraph. The boy and his father end up in the kitchen, while they dance the poem explains that the pots and pans slid all around and of shelves itself. The reader gets a sense of rowdiness and clumsiness that the father exhibits. Continue reading the mother cannot keep a frown her face because the kitchen and everything is getting destroyed.

Many critics agree that the poem is clearly about loss but some argue about the central theme. The most common theme is mastering loss. Dodd said,”Loss is its subject, but the poem begins almost trivially.” Dodd means that this poem is about loss, and it begins so simple. The theme sits in the poem and its not hard to discover when even reading the first line, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,”. As well as loss, the poem recalls the speakers own experience with it. Another common thread found from this poem is how hard it is to overcome loss of love. This theme is significant for the demotion of this poem. When readers first look at the fourth stanza on line two, they imagine that the words “...of three loved houses went,” represent physical houses. Excerpt critic Cone sees otherwise. Cone states that these three loved houses that were lost represent lost loves. Cone also states that losing love is not a one in a million experience. To overcome these losses, Bishop states “...lose something everyday...”. Loss is a common experience which is inevitable in the human life yet, extreme loss of family of loved ones is not an everyday experience. People cannot survive this loss without learning how to deal with it in a non-disastrous way. “The idea that disaster pervades everyday life is crucial to the poem, belying the repeated claim that grief can be mastered gracefully, by art or any other

The set of six words that Elizabeth Bishop has selected to repeat in her poem Sestina are ‘house’, ‘grandmother’, ‘child’, ‘stove’, ‘almanac’, and ‘tears’. These words are essential in order for the essence of the poem to be realized, which is about a seemingly ordinary interaction between an older woman and a child in the kitchen of a house on a rainy fall evening. Going through their routine activities of having tea and reading jokes from an almanac. Through the use and repetition of certain words and images, the poet communicates that although there is no overt exposition of an unfortunate event, there is an atmosphere of tragedy surrounding the two characters.

The description of the tree and the birds is a metaphor for her and her ex-lovers, respectively, that reveals her feelings of helpless in the process of aging. The personification of the tree as it “stands” and “knows” confirms that the tree metaphor for the speaker’s experiences (9, 10). Just as a tree cannot control the seasons that it goes through, the speaker cannot control the process of aging and the subsequent loss of beauty she experiences with it. The poem’s use of the adjective “lonely” to describe the tree further contributes to its gloomy tone (9). The metaphor continues by emphasizing the point that the speaker never got to truly know her lovers.

The poem is a reality poem about real life. It infers about memories, nature, and the cycle of life and death. Things can only stay beautiful for so long, but the circle of life will continue. The ending seems like the world is over, but in reality it will keep on going.

1) The story takes place in a large room, used for meeting people, in the narrator’s house. A list of words that is used to describe the setting and atmosphere is: dreary, weak and weary, sorrow, sad, uncertain rustling, darkness, thrilled, terrors, fearing, burning, mystery, nightly, ghastly grim, lonely, stillness, unmerciful disaster, unhappy. 2) The atmosphere seems very melancholy and miserable. The imagery in the beginning of the poem contains: dreary, weak and weary.

The poem discovers that the death of a close friend or family member affects an individual mentally, physically, and emotionally. At first, the narrator acknowledges that the death cause change when he/she says, “Except the Dying - this to Us / Made Nature different.” When the narrator says, “Except the Dying,” she is singling out the woman’s death as the source of change. Capitalization of the words, “Except” and “Dying,” emphasizes that the death is the cause of change; it changes the people’s nature. “Nature” is representing the regular mental state that these people maintain. This means that the death removed the people from a comfortable mental state and placed them in a traumatic state of mind.

“Sestina” climaxes in the last three stanzas and upon reading the end of this poem, I’m lead to believe that these objects may not impact the grandmother’s life beneficially. During the envoi, what was thought to be the comforting almanac states that it is “[time] to plant tears” (122). It is as if the almanac believes and relishes in the fact that it is the root of the grandmother’s sadness. There are a couple of ways the almanac undermines her happiness. In

I agree when you say that the tone shifts towards the end of the poem. It goes from hopeful and excited, to dark and almost fearful of the inevitable. It is a morbid epiphany of reality. Life is only so long and the speaker does not intend on wasting it. Although, now that I think it over again, maybe he is not intending to be dark, but his focus on how quick life can slip away thrills him and pushes him even further to seize every opportunity presented to him. It is almost like a public service announcement to both his readers, and Corrina, to not waste their

After reading the poem, “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop, it seemed as if the poet attempted to convey to the idea of one bottling up and hiding their genuine feelings. Perhaps, the author is trying to express to her audience that while emotional restraint may be appropriate at times, it is vital for every individual to express the way they feel in order to alleviate themselves from the burden they may be carrying. At the start of the poem, it describes how the grandmother and child are reading jokes from the almanac on a rainy September evening. As they are reading the jokes, the poem states how the grandmother is “laughing and talking to hide her tears.” It is pretty clear that the grandmother is trying to conceal her true feelings from the