Elizabeth Bishop is a Massachusetts native who happened to be independently wealthy to travel and dedicate her life to poetry. At the age of one, Bishop’s father passed away leaving her mother a widow who then suffered from mental illness. The poem, Sestina, is a reflection of Bishop’s life at this time of her father’s passing. In reality, Bishop was forced to live with her relatives knowing that she would never see her mother again. 

Sestina is defined as, “a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words appearing in the closing three-line envoi.” Elizabeth Bishop uses this title and also performs this kind of poem to describe a scene of family uncertainty to concentrate on the relationship between the old grandmother, the child and the irresistible continuity of time by using the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences resulting in the themes of this poem: house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, and tears. 

There is a feeling of sadness and something has happened that is fateful and mysterious. It’s September and it’s raining: “September rain falls on the house” and the grandmother and child sit in the kitchen of their house as the light fades: “In the failing light, the old grandmother / sits in the kitchen with the child” a simple start to this poem but as the poem progress, this cozy domestic scene begins to alter in shape and tone.

“The Death of the Hired man” is a long poem in form of a conversation happening between two characters, Warren and his wife Mary, talking about possible options on what to do with Silas, a former worker of Warren’s who left after being offered pocket money, but made his way back in the wintertime. Silas decided to come back in poor health but made it his mission to help Warren and Mary with the farm once again. Mary is all for more than second chances, but Warren does not want any parts of Silas because he feels as though he did right by him by all means: “When was I ever anything but kind to him? / But I’ll not have the fellow back.” Mary mentions how Silas talked about making a great team which he then includes another character in the mix by the name of Harold Wilson: “Silas declares you’ll have to get him back. / He says they two will make a team for work: / Between them they will lay this farm as smooth!” She also mentions that Silas says he would teach the boy more about haymaking: “He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be / Some good perhaps to someone in the world.” This shows that Silas is not much of a worthless person because he has concerns for other folks and not himself. 

Tension is built in the poem not only because he leaves Warren, but he has a brother that is a couple more miles away from them: “Silas has better claim on us you think/ Than his brother? Thirteen little miles / As the road winds would bring him to his door. / Silas has walked that far no doubt today. / What doesn’t he go there? His brother’s rich, / A somebody – director in the bank.” As Warren still feuds over the presence of Silas being inside of his house, Mary states: “Worthless though he is, / He won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.” She urges Warren to sit down and chat with Silas and hash out their differences, but it was too late: Warren returned — too soon, it seemed to her — / Slipped to her side, caught up in her hand and waited. / ‘Warren?’ she questioned. / ‘Dead’ was all he answered.”

The main theme interpreted in this poem is home. Although Silas has a brother who he should have gone to because he was his blood relative, Silas chose Warren and Mary to go home to and die. At the beginning of the poem, Warren was bitter and upset. Sarcastically, Warren states: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” Silas came back to what he considered his home to get a reaffirmation for the meaning of his life before he dies by helping with the farm for the next season. Towards the end of the poem, Warren lightens up and fights himself to accept his responsibility of providing a home for Silas. Mary warns Warren: “He’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove. / When I came up from Rowe’s I found him there, / Huddled against the barn-door fast asleep, / A miserable sight, and frightening, too– / You needn’t smile — I didn’t recognise him — / I wasn’t looking for him — and he’s changed. / Wait till you see.” She later states: “he has come home to die: / You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.” At that point, Warren tried to make amends, but it was too late.

Theodore Roethke was a high-minded poet-intellectual of the 1940s through the 1960s. During his adolescent years, his father passed away from cancer and his uncle committed suicide, leaving Roethke abandoned and lost. In the poem, “My Papa’s Waltz” the author places his audience in the form of a young boy waltzing with his father; or are they waltzing hypothetically speaking? In lines 1-2, “The whiskey on your breath / Could make a small boy dizzy;” gives a visual picture of a drunk father and son up close to one another in either a waltz defined as a dance in triple time performed by a couple or metaphorically speaking, could waltzing also mean an altercation? The poem could be interpreted in two ways: a positive aspect or a negative aspect. 

For the positive aspect, the author concluded in lines 15-16, “Then waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt” which could indicate the admiration of a son for his father. In the sense, imagine a child playing with their parent for a while until they are tired and then imagining the parent getting ready to tuck them into bed for the night. In lines 3-4, “ But I hung on like death: / Such waltzing was not easy” indicated that although the young boy knew his father was drunk, he still interacted with him no matter the circumstance. 

From the negative point of view, before ending the poem at the beginning of the last stanza, in lines 13-14, “You beat time on my head / With a palm caked hard by dirt,” and then including the last two lines (15-16), gave a sense of abuse from the father. Starting at the beginning of the poem, the author describes the father as drunk and may have started an altercation with his son. In lines 7-8, the mother is added to the poem stating that she is upset with a frown upon her face. During the time frame of Roethke’s life span, women were not able to have a voice against the man in charge. She probably could not do plenty to protect her son, so instead, she stood and watched.        

Elizabeth Bishop was a painter and poet who used her painting skills to display the vivid imagery in her poetry. Plenty of her poetry celebrated the settings of busy-factories, farms, and fishing. Bishop was a perfectionist whose verses marked the precise descriptions of the physical world used to include the struggle to find a sense of belonging and the human experiences of grief and longing as she did in her poem “The Fish”.

In the poem, “The Fish”, Bishop keeps her scenery in one place with the use of impressive descriptions of a fish and her surroundings. In lines 10-15, she begins describing the appearance of the fish she caught while fishing and creating an allusion based off appearance, “…his brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper, / and its pattern of darker-brown / was like wallpaper: / shapes like full-blown roses / stained and lost through age.” Before describing the fish, the author included that the fish did not fight the urge of being caught. Bishop then understands the reasoning of the fish as the fish has fought its battles by being caught a few plenties of times before. She refers the fish to a medal by using a simile in lines 61-64 to draw the comparison, “Like medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering, / a five-haired beard of wisdom, / trailing from his aching jaw.” Then comes a highly descriptive rainbow which gave the character in Bishop’s poem the quality for victory to enable the fish to be free.