Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" was initially published in The New Yorker magazine in 1956. It is, as the title indicates, a sestina—an unrhymed verse form with French origins, in which the concluding words of each line in the poem's opening sestet are repeated as concluding words throughout the following five sestets and closing tercets, reordered in every stanza according to a complex pattern.
The poem describes a domestic scene, in which a small child and the child's grandmother interact at the grandmother's home. The work suggests—but does not explicitly state—that some traumatic event has occurred in the child's family, prompting the child to stay or live with the grandmother. Both grandmother and grandchild appear to grapple with the emotional and practical aftereffects of this trauma, though they do not discuss it. Critics have argued that the poem reflects certain autobiographical facts of Bishop's life: as a child, Bishop's father died, and her mother was institutionalized as a result of mental illness. As a result, the young Bishop lived with her grandmother, much like the child in the poem. The poem's earlier, discarded title, "Early Sorrow," brings these autobiographical readings to the fore.
"Sestina" is written with Elizabeth Bishop's characteristic restraint. Powerful emotions and intense moments in the lives of the two characters emerge elliptically and subtly. Through the repetitions and rearrangements of the sestina form, Bishop conveys these characters' emotional realities via a slow buildup, in which repeated words gradually, almost imperceptibly, gain a new charge and assume new meanings. It is one of Bishop's best-known works, as well as one of the most popular examples of a sestina in twentieth-century poetry.
