Summary
Outside, September rain is falling. Inside the house, a grandmother is sitting next to the stove reading to a grandchild from an almanac (a book containing information about the weather, the calendar, and growing crops). As she reads, the grandmother talks and laughs to disguise the fact that she is crying.
The grandmother thinks that her tears, falling on the equinox—one of the nights of the year in which day and night are of equal length—were predicted by the almanac and by the falling rain. However, only the grandmother knows this. As the kettle whistles on the stove, the grandmother gets up to cut slices of bread.
She tells the grandchild that it's time for tea. The grandchild ignores her, busy watching drops of water from the kettle fall like tears and jump on the hot stove. They look the way the raindrops look on the roof of the house. The grandmother cleans, hanging up the almanac from a string where it's kept.
The almanac hovers like a bird over the grandmother, over her cup of tear-like hot tea, and over the child. The grandmother announces that it is cold and puts more wood in the stove.
Analysis
With the opening of this poem, Elizabeth Bishop sets a scene—one we'll remain in throughout the poem. This is a sestina, a seven-stanza form composed of six sestets (six-line stanzas) and a closing three-line stanza known as an "envoi." The concluding words of each of the six lines in the first sestet are repeated throughout the poem, so that every single line ends on one of those six words. They are arranged and rearranged in a complex, interwoven pattern throughout the first six stanzas, so that the order of these concluding words within a stanza is never the same. In the three lines of the envoi, all six words appear. The pattern of repetitions can be represented as follows (with each number representing one word):
Stanza 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2: 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4: 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5: 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6: 2 4 6 5 3 1
Envoi: 6 2 1 4 5 3
This repetition of concluding words means that the first stanza sets the scene for the rest of the work: whichever words are used in that stanza will remain with us for the next six stanzas. Here, the words are house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, and tears.
These words give us a hint as to the themes and events of the poem. They offer a distilled version of the poem as a whole. The words "grandmother" and "grandchild," combined with "stove" and "house," tell us that we're entering a domestic sphere: a scene of family and intergenerational contact in the home. The word "almanac" suggests a certain routineness, since almanacs are reference guides to predictable patterns, such as the movements of the stars. Yet the word "tears" also informs us that some rupture is undercutting the coziness and routine of the domestic space.
Bishop, with her typical restraint, keeps the reader in something of a limbo by blending vagueness and specificity here. We are told the month—September—and even, in a way, the day—it's the fall equinox. We're even given the specific brand of the stove in the grandmother's house. Yet we don't know who this grandmother and grandchild are. Their names, their relationship, and their circumstances are left unsaid. We have to guess why "tears" are one of the recurring words in the poem, and infer the nature of the sadness that haunts this household. One of the poem's implications is that some crisis in the child's home has led to them living or staying with the grandmother. This isn't stated explicitly, but here, the very fact that the child and grandmother are together with no middle generation suggests it. So does the fact that the grandmother reads from an almanac, a surprising choice for a child's entertainment, which hints that the household doesn't typically have children in it.
The poem focuses on cycles and routines—the cycles of the year and seasons, the cycles of the weather, even the cycles of the day, with the routines of tea and cleaning. The almanac itself is a kind of compendium of these cycles, predicting and tracking them. From one perspective, the sorrow disrupting this family is a disruption of those cycles, causing cleaning, cooking, and other routines to become strange and difficult. But the grandmother seems to feel that even this sorrow is part of a predictable circle of life. She believes, Bishop writes, that both her tears and the rain were "foretold by the almanac," listed among all the other cycles there, although only she—perhaps because of her age—is able to understand this.
