The form of the poem, “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop was incredibly interesting to me, and something I felt informed the poem’s meaning remarkably well; the recurring use of certain words in the poem draws attention to significant themes such as family, home, grief, and time, and the concluding words in this context are all directly linked to these themes. The poem’s structure creates a sense of repetition and circularity, reminiscent of the seasonal cycles mentioned in the opening stanza. The strict and predictable form also reflects the inevitability of external forces that impact the grandmother and child. I was also struck by how the intertwined words in the poem might symbolize the profound bond between the grandmother and her grandchild, as well as the transmission of trauma across generations. Each stanza inherits and reorganizes fragments from the preceding one, mirroring how children inherit traits, but more importantly, trauma, from their parents and grandparents. Even the poem’s title, in some roundabout way, alludes to this cyclical nature of inter-generational struggle through a reference to its repetitive form.

I’m also quite curious about Bishops outlook on her own poetry. After a quick google search, I found that she didn’t like to include herself in the genre of confessional poetry, even though I would consider her chosen subject matter and form to fall quite directly under that categorization, and I wondered what her reasoning behind this distinction might be.