Lesson 31: Bilingual Sestina
1) Describe the prosody of the poem
The poem is (as the title suggests) a French form of poetry called a sestina which consists of 6 stanzas of six lines each and an “envoy” of three lines that finishes the poem. Each of the 6 lines of the poem ends with one of six words or their variants. In this case they are: said, English, closed, words, nombres, and Spanish. The poem then merely rearranges the ending. It starts as abcdef. Then it mutates as follows: faebdc, cfdabe, ecdfad, deacfb, bedfeca. In the last three lines, the envoy, all of the ending words are used and the last three is bfb for some reason. According to the back of the book it is ace but that doesn’t make sense.
2) Effect of personification and allusion in first stanza? What is the Spanish counterpart to each? Sum up the meaning of the stanza.
The narrator’s attitude toward the English language is done through personifying the English language as “snowy, blonde, blue-eyed, gum chewing.” (Apparently this is a stereotyped American girl… Definitely wouldn’t have made that connection on my own.) Also, there is an allusion to the national anthem by “dawn’s early light” in the third line. The imagery which in the context of the poem that constitutes our national anthem would evoke in most Americans the rugged flag, evokes a different memory in the narrator. She thinks of the dawn of her home and the dark-skinned girls who spoke her tongue.
3) What mood is evoked in stanza two? How does language create this mood?
Nostalgia. Simple. That is what is evoked by the naming of old friends. “A child learning the nombres” “before” all of these are a longing for the past.
4) What do we learn in stanzas two and three about the difference between names and vocabulary words? How does the example of the plan called morivivir illustrate this gap? What does the metaphor of the genii in the bottle tell us about the nature of language?
Names have history behind them. Vocabulary words do not. Vocabulary words are “language closed” The plant was like a vocabulary word because it closed when it was touched. Words are powerful, yes, but they are also frail. Because even a name can yield nothing.
5) In stanzas four and five, why does the speaker invoke Gladys and Rosario from her childhood? How is her childhood sensitivity to words inextricably bound to Spanish, her first language? What is significant about the allusion to Adam, the first man?
The speaker invokes Gladys and Rosario because they have the Spanish words that meant so much more to the speaker than the dry English words. Her childhood sensitivity is bound to Spanish because they were the first words put into her mouth by her childhood friends. No one else did, not even the first man.
