Summary
The stove and the almanac both speak up: the stove says that this situation was meant to be, and the almanac says enigmatically that it knows what's happening. The child draws a stiff-looking house with a winding path leading to it, and a man who has tear-like buttons on him. They show the picture to the grandmother.
The grandmother goes back to work at the stove. In secret, moons from the almanac fall down like tears, landing in a flowerbed that the child has drawn in front of the house.
The almanac announces that it is time to plant tears. The grandmother sings at the stove, and the child draws yet another equally mysterious house.
Analysis
A gentle, mild change in point of view takes place around the fifth stanza of this work—whereas before the grandmother's perspective has been foregrounded, now the child's experience becomes more prominent. Our first hint of this is in the personification of the almanac and the stove. We already know that, for the grandmother, these events feel fated or foretold. Now, we see that the child feels similarly, in their own way. They sense the stove declaring "It was to be," as if the child, too, feels that this recent rupture in their life was an inevitable one. However, for the child, these instincts are featured through a youthful, imaginative lens, emerging in the personification of everyday objects. Meanwhile, while the child does not cry as the grandmother does, their drawing reveals the complexity of their grief. They draw a "rigid" house, the adjective suggesting some unhappiness or brittleness in their home, with the "winding" pathway evoking complexity, difficulty, or confusion. Most strikingly, they draw a man who seems to be crying, though they do not cry themselves. The grandmother and grandchild are experiencing similar emotions, but they do not discuss them explicitly. Instead, they communicate through prosaic acts of domestic care (on the part of the grandmother) and through drawing (on the part of the grandchild), avoiding emotional openness.
The poem's emotional complexity is echoed by a conceptual complexity, although the simplicity of Bishop's language can keep this from feeling dizzying. Here, various scales and planes of reality intertwine and affect one another. The rainfall outside is echoed by the grandmother's tears, the tear-like features of the man in the drawing, and the drops from the teakettle. The child draws a house, which exists, in the drawing, inside the grandmother's house. The almanac, meanwhile, contains and predicts events like the weather and seasons. At the poem's end, this intertwining of different levels of reality becomes nearly magical. The moon illustrations in the almanac fall out and change form, then drop into the child's drawing as tears. The stove, meanwhile, goes from "Marvel" to "marvelous," again suggesting the transformation of the mundane into something otherworldly. The blend of outside and inside, real and imaginary, large and small, makes us feel that this is a curiously boundaryless world. The protected space of the grandmother's house cannot keep the outside world or the past at bay. At the same time, this modest, mundane setting contains wonders, however hidden and however strange.
