While people usually look for the meaning in the poem first, Bishop obviously means to buck that trend by naming her poem Sestina. True to its name the poem follows that exact form of a sestina. The sestina is a poem divided into seven stanzas: six sestets and then a three-lined envoi. Every line in each of these sestet ends with a different one the words house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, and tears. Here, Bishop follows the rigid to the structure to the bone – tracking the word ‘house’ you can see it goes 1, 2, 4, 5, 3, 6. The structure of the sestina makes it so that the reader feels trapped; they are stuck in a cycle of the same six words. It seems to me that Bishop is playing off of this structure to put the reader in the place
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At this point in Bishop’s life she is already living with her grandmother, which means that her father must have already died, and that her mother must have been institutionalized. This is represented in the man that the child in the poem draws. Here we see that there is a distinction in the young child and the elder grandmother. The child is happy about her drawing and she ‘proudly’ shows it to her grandmother. However the grandmother’s deep depression comes out in the passage and the buttons seem to mirror the tears that are associated with this grandmother. As this is an autobiographical poem, the child is made to represent Bishop – and the man can be thought of as her diseased …show more content…
The child in that poem asks, “But how could Arthur go, clutching his tiny lily, with his eyes shut up so tight and the roads deep in snow?” This means that the child yet does not fully grasp the idea of death. This is important because First Death of Nova Scotia comes directly after Sestina and if this serves as a chronology then we can safely assume that the child in Sestina hasn’t been jaded with the experiences that come with time. The child-like Bishop still maintains her blissful ignorance. As Bishop is the author of these two poems as well, we can see that time has allowed her to grasp these concepts in her
At this point in Bishop’s life she is already living with her grandmother, which means that her father must have already died, and that her mother must have been institutionalized. This is represented in the man that the child in the poem draws. Here we see that there is a distinction in the young child and the elder grandmother. The child is happy about her drawing and she ‘proudly’ shows it to her grandmother. However the grandmother’s deep depression comes out in the passage and the buttons seem to mirror the tears that are associated with this grandmother. As this is an autobiographical poem, the child is made to represent Bishop – and the man can be thought of as her diseased …show more content…
The child in that poem asks, “But how could Arthur go, clutching his tiny lily, with his eyes shut up so tight and the roads deep in snow?” This means that the child yet does not fully grasp the idea of death. This is important because First Death of Nova Scotia comes directly after Sestina and if this serves as a chronology then we can safely assume that the child in Sestina hasn’t been jaded with the experiences that come with time. The child-like Bishop still maintains her blissful ignorance. As Bishop is the author of these two poems as well, we can see that time has allowed her to grasp these concepts in her