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the lunar cycle, they are also representative of the often sad passage from one part of the cycle into another. As the moons fall from the old grandmother's "clever almanac," a traditional tool that is venerable, trustworthy and full of practical and interesting knowledge, they enter the flower bed of the child to grow.
On the subject of symbols, the six words included in every stanza are all built up to become symbols not only by relying on their normal connotations, but also by the repetition that is a fundamental part of a sestina; the six words are used with varying adjectives and verbs to give them a scope of meaning that is unique to the poem, or in any case to strengthen those attributes that are already part of the word. In fact, it is because the symbols can be constructed in this way, sestinas have been considered "emblematic poems," meaning that they "communicate meaning to the intuition by embodying it rather than to reason by stating it (Spanos)." If that is true, then Sestina more than lives up to its name. While some of the others have already been discussed, there remains the important image of the house. The images associated with the house change as the poem goes. First the rain falls on the house. Then the rain beats on the house. Next the rain is dancing on the house. Then the house feels chilly to the grandmother, and then the child draws a house that is rigid, and then the drawing of the house has a flower bed placed in front of it. Finally, the house is inscrutable. Indeed it is a mysterious house.

So to take this apart, we can first say that the house there is a distinction here between two houses: the real one and the one on the child's paper (and by extension, in the child's mind). The real house stands under the relentless cold rain of September for three stanzas, and itself is chilled by the damp fall weather. In contrast, the child's imagined house is rigid, not sagging under rain, and there is a flower bed out in the front. Flowers don't really fit as well into an autumn landscape, and they are probably all gone by the time that this time in September. Curiously, there is something else that comes with the child's imagined house that has apparently no parallel in their current reality: the child draws a man in front of the house. In any case, the child's imagined house is much different from the grandmother's actual house. As an extension of each one, their respective houses show their condition the grandmother's end and the child's

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