Benton 57. A solitary tea service with a spoon from Bishop’s own set of flatware bearing the initial “B”, set in a field of vegetation bordered by darkness, and drawn with a child’s simple resources – crayon and pencil – the scene inevitably recalls Bishop’s tea-time poem “Sestina”, originally titled “Early Sorrow”, published in The New Yorker in 1956. In this poem, an episode from Bishop’s own early childhood in Nova Scotia, a lonely, unheeded child resorts to the only rudimentary artistic means available to cope with, and perhaps in some subconscious way understand, her family’s grief: "With crayons the child draws a rigid house and a winding pathway. Then the child puts in a man with buttons like tears and shows it proudly to the grandmother. But secretly, while the grandmother busies herself about the stove, the little moons fall down like tears from between the pages of the almanac into the flower bed the child has carefully placed in front of the house. Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove And the child draws another inscrutable house.".