Poems are a window to the soul

It is a dark and gloomy day and it seems to be night time, but you realize it’s still daytime. Outside its raining and chilly and you can feel it from the comfort of your home, like most people you feel gloomy because of the darkness and the cold weather. This is the setting in which Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sestina” places the reader as they go through this poem. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sestina” is a very moving poem that explores a slightly darker area which is an area that poet’s enjoy writing about. September is the first month of fall, September also seems to be very important in the poem not only because it’s the first word but because of the feeling it provides to the poem.

In this poem, the author is portraying the general feeling that everything must come to an end and after that nothing will come. The cold weather shows us the reader or audience that there is an influence from the beginning with the first line having September to show us the reader an instance of foreshadowing. A lot of literature uses the seasons as symbols, Spring for rebirth, Summer for the prime of life, Fall for decline, and Winter for death. September is mentioned in the very beginning of the poem “Sestina” in the first line and if we follow the way seasons are used, and then this poem is placed in the second worst setting for literature. Even though winter is known for death this poem has a sense of sadness, of lose but it is unclear if it has happened or it is foreshadowing death and despair. We are given more evidence about the sadness when bishop wrote “reading jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears. (Line 5-6)”. This can mean she laughing so hard that the grandmother is starting to crying but by the evidence of the lit...

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...has to be read more than once to be understood and this makes it so we as the reader can enjoy this poem and in reality isn’t that why poems are made? The poem provides many examples that there are sad elements and that they are mainly shown though the grandmother. Because of the sad elements this poem makes the reader understand the elements on a deeper, more personal level, this is a part that Bishop is explores a slightly darker area which she seems to have a great grasp on.

Works Cited

Bishop Elizabeth. “Sestina” Schakel, Peter J., and Jack Ridl.Approaching literature: reading + thinking + writing. 3rd ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2012. Print.

Lankford, Ryan. "Bishop's Sestina." EBSCO Discovery. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2014. .