Sestina Elizabeth Bishop free essay sample

Sestina never states the cause of the characters sadness. The fact that it is a man whom the child draws with buttons like tears may suggest that someone—the grandfather or perhaps the childs father—has died or left. Certainly, the grief is serious, for the final three lines indicate hat the problem will persist. A study of Bishops life reveals her father died when she was one year old, but the absence that may have troubled her more was that of her mother, whom Bishop never saw after she was institutionalized for serious mental illness. The loss of both parents resulted in the young Bishop spending time with her grandmother in Nova Scotia as well as having to move unwillingly to Massachusetts to attend school. Bishop never outgrew the spectre of her mother and the terrible feeling of not belonging Forms and Devices Bishop grouped Sestina with several other poems about her childhood in Nova Scotia in her 1965 book Questions of Travel. We will write a custom essay sample on Sestina Elizabeth Bishop or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Living in Brazil, she found, brought back vivid memories of life in Great Village, along the Bay of Fundy. In Sestina, as well as First Death in Nova Scotia, a child figures prominently, providing a persona through which the mature poet presents the past. The use of the third person voice in Sestina blends the poets adult perspective with the childs. It also permits Bishop to control the emotional distance between the reader and the character. The first stanzas focus on the grandmother, but when Bishop presents the childs perception of the teakettle in the third stanza, the language becomes more urgent. The choice of the third person may have helped Bishop treat highly charged memories, may have allowed her, in other words, to steady herself emotionally and use the characters—human and not—to re-enact a persisting trauma. The setting—both atmosphere and place—is also vital to the story. The chilly, rainy weather, as mentioned earlier, mirrors the unhappiness in the kitchen. Bishop set the poem at a turning point. The season, as the month and the word equinoctial signal, is changing. It is likely, given the fact that Nova Scotia sits halfway between the equator and the North Pole, that the failing light is also seasonal. On the other hand, the kitchen, particularly the stove, permits Bishop to emphasize the grandmothers desire for warmth and comfort. The stove, in fact, is reminiscent of fairy tales, especially those in which security and nurturing prepare for a childs maturing. The poetic form Bishop chose, the sestina, imparts a sense of suspension. This form, which originated in Provencal verse of the Middle Ages, requires the repetition of six words at the ends of lines. The order changes in a prescribed way through six stanzas of six lines, then the six words appear, two per line, in a three-line envoy. In Sestina, the repetition seems obsessive, emphasizing the isolation of the scene and the way it encloses the characters. It is particularly easy to feel the repetition as the first line of a stanza ends with the last word of the previous stanza. Regardless of the number of arrangements of the final words, the sense of loss persists. The envoy makes it clear that the trauma has not been resolved. As much as one examines devices, there remains a feature—tone—that might best be called pure Bishop style. Labels such as bemused, knowing, detached, ironic, and whimsical catch elements of it. The emphasis upon tears, and the artificial way they are portrayed, is one trademark, as is the precise sense of visual detail (Bishop herself sketched and did watercolours). In addition, this poem often sounds like prose: the use of dialogue, for example, and the long, careful sentence comprising the sixth