As a sestina, repetition is baked into the poem's form:
- The sestina pattern dictates that every line ends with one of the following words: "house," "grandmother," "child," "stove," "almanac," and "tears." Broadly, this repetition calls attention to important themes in the poem: family, home, time, and grief. The words also link stanzas together in a way that might call to mind a web of familial connections. The words from stanza 1 are, in essence, inherited by the following stanzas, just as the child will inherit the trauma of whatever loss has taken place.
- The revolving word endings might also call to mind the cycling of the seasons, the passage of time, and the inevitability of loss; the reader knows that certain words will appear in each stanza, just as the grandmother knows that hardships will crop up throughout life. (The sestina's pattern of repetition is described at length under the Form section of this guide.)
Other words crop up throughout the poem as well. For example, the speaker repeats the words "rain," "old," and "Marvel" throughout, calling attention to the dreary setting, the grandmother's age, and the warmth of that old-timey Marvel stove.
The speaker turns to the specific kind of repetition called diacope in lines 15-16 where the child watches drops of water from the tea kettle "dance like mad on the hot black stove, / the way the rain must dance on the house." This repetition creates a connection between the teakettle's metaphorical "tears" and the rain that is falling down on the roof of the house. Water falls from the kettle, the sky, and the grandmother's eyes; these are all symbolic tears, markers of the grief that threatens to flood this family's world.
The anaphora in lines 20-21 emphasizes the connection between "the child" and "the old grandmother":
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
An almanac contains various forecasts and astronomical measurements. That ominously hovering almanac represents the future that hangs over both the grandmother and the child, as well as the various forces that will pull their lives in certain directions.
Finally, listen to the parallelism in lines 25-26:
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
Here, repetitive language fills the lines with a sense of firmness and finality. It sounds as though these two inanimate objects are agreeing that the human beings in this house are beholden to the whims of fate.