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Tears symbolize both the expression of and the repression of strong emotion. Tears offer a strategy for coping, ironically, without coping.
In the poem, tears only raise questions. There is no given reason why the grandmother, even as she moves about the kitchen, cries as she prepares the tea for her granddaughter. Tears are her way of coping with something the poem never explains. After all, the grandmother knows what neither the child nor the reader knows.
There is no explanation given for where the parents are, why the child is with her grandmother, and whether this is a visit or something more complicated. More to the point, the whole world seems to be crying. There is the autumn rain, the condensation droplets falling off the tea kettle and sizzling on the burner, and the tear-shaped buttons on the coat of the man in the child’s drawing. Even the tea itself resembles “dark brown tears” (Line 22). Finally, from the pages of the almanac suspended above the child, tiny moons seem to fall “like tears” (Line 33).
Tears, then, symbolize the powerful emotional experience that is never directly confronted but is all around. The poem suggests that the deepest, strongest traumas are handled indirectly and quietly. Whether they’re for the protection of the young child or for the emotional stability of the grandmother, or both, tears symbolize how to manage The Impact of Loss and trauma.
As the grandmother prepares the afternoon tea and, feeling chilly, stokes the stove with firewood, the child draws with crayons at the kitchen table. The child’s drawing of a house with a path and garden and a “man with buttons like tears” (Line 27) symbolizes that the child, despite her grandmother’s efforts to protect her emotionally from whatever has happened, may know more than the grandmother thinks. The child is aware of the loss of her familiar surroundings, her home, and a man who, in her picture, is outside the house, his coat buttons shaped like tears. Drawing from Elizabeth Bishop’s early life (See: Poet Biography), the home the girl draws may represent Bishop’s home back in Massachusetts, and the man may represent her dead father. Like her grandmother’s stifled tears, drawing is the child’s coping mechanism.
The figure of the man in the picture frozen forever outside his house, with his very clothes in mourning, may symbolize the child’s perception of her dead father and her way of coping with that loss through the agency of art. After all, through her imagination and with the help of crayons, she can conjure her missing father and draw him back into her world. She is, in fact, proud of her work and proud of what she has created—if not her father, then father enough; if not real, then real enough.
In this, the drawing symbolizes the power (and the impotence) of art itself. As an artist creating presence from absence, the child expresses the trauma of her loss by drawing her way back to the home and father she has lost. There, in the crayon drawing, he is, and there, in the crayon drawing, he is not. That is the problematic consolation of art.
The almanac is an important part of the experience in the grandmother’s kitchen. It symbolizes the human need for explanation and predictability. The almanac’s happy jokes provide the grandmother and the child with a moment of laughter. Then, the almanac literally hangs above the afternoon tea when the grandmother returns it to its hook. That privileged position, hanging there in the kitchen, suggests how important the almanac is to the routine of the grandmother’s house.
Both characters struggle to adjust to the unexpected trauma that has impacted them. In this, both the grandmother and the child are victims of unexpected misfortune or unanticipated circumstances to which they must now adjust—the grandmother through her tears the child through her crayon drawings. They are both victims of surprise.
In the rural culture of the early 20th century, before the advent of global technology and the growth of scientific research, the almanac offered the people in that agrarian world a data book that claimed to outline an entire year of reliable meteorological predictions grounded in charting the movements of stars and planets. In the poem, the almanac, in offering reliable and predictable patterns for the future, symbolizes the human need for pattern and routine against and amid the chaos and confusion of real-time events that, in the end, can never be entirely predicted. The almanac symbolizes the need for normalcy. Whatever happens, the almanac says (literally, in a moment of anthropomorphism), “I know what I know” (Line 26).
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By Elizabeth Bishop