Personification of the Stove: Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina"

I have spent the last several days working on a number of sestinas.  Given the restrictions of the form, it has given rise to some interesting stories unlike anything I’ve written previously.  It has forced me to take on a new approach to how I dictate my thoughts and describe subject matter.  During this process, I’ve been reading sestinas written by other poets, most notably a piece composed by Elizabeth Bishop, simply entitled “Sestina.”

The most famous of Bishop’s sestinas, “Sestina” explores a scene depicting a child at a grandmother’s house.  Interestingly, it also centers on the house itself, as well as two objects within it, an almanac and a stove.  Joining these five words, “child,” “grandmother,” “house,” “almanac,” and “stove,” is the infinitely expressive “tears.”  In the first stanza, Bishop sets the scene where a “September rain falls on the house.”  The talent of Bishop’s craft has, in one line, set the time of year, the weather and the overarching mood.  It also sets the tone of the poem as somber, reinforced in the grandmother’s “failing light” and the jokes she reads with the child out of the almanac to “hide her tears.”  As a reader, I can only make assumptions about what causes her to despair, but it acts as a perfect mirror to the “September rain” outside of the house.

My favorite aspect of this poem is the way in which Bishop personifies the stove and the almanac.  The almanac plays several roles, acting as an entertainer with the previously described jokes, an oracle with its predictions of rain, and a protector in its method of mimicking the roof, “birdlike,… / [hovering] half open above the child /…the old grandmother.”  In this way, it borrows from the guardian trait of the house and the grandmother, reducing their necessity in the protection of the child.  The stove is the warmth and the provider; Christlike in the care it has for the grandmother and child.  Likewise, the grandmother tends the stove with reverence, singing to it (as the kettle does) and keeping it fed with wood.  The almanac and the stove are given unspoken lines in the fifth stanza, further reinforcing the importance of their roles as personified caretakers.

For the job it does containing the child, grandmother, stove and almanac, the house seems to play a singular role in the poem, acting as the physical frame in which the scene takes place.  Bishop describes it primarily as being the object onto which the rain is constantly pounding.  It does seem to have significance for the child, however.  The child, in the fifth stanza and the closing triplet, is described as drawing a house, which Bishop describes as “rigid” and “inscrutable,” respectively.  This action of drawing a house is something I recall doing in my youth, whereby children tend to draw things that represent significant importance in their life.  The house is the physical protector, despite the fact that it can only contain the stove’s warmth.  It does inarguably keep them physically dry, though.

I want to write about the significance of the tears, but I’m having a difficult time finding the right words to describe what I’m feeling about Bishop’s use of the word, so I think that might be best saved for another post in the near future.

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Sestina

 

by Elizabeth Bishop

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.