Sestina

The sestina is a complex French verse form consisting of six six-line stanzas (sestets) followed by a three-line envoi, for a total of thirty-nine lines. What makes the sestina unique among fixed forms is that it does not use rhyme; instead, it is governed by the repetition and rotation of six end-words. The six words that end the lines of the first stanza reappear as end-words in every subsequent stanza, but in a shifting order determined by a fixed permutation pattern known as retrogradatio cruciata (backward crossing). If the first stanza's end-words are numbered 1-2-3-4-5-6, the second stanza orders them 6-1-5-2-4-3, and subsequent stanzas continue the spiral. The envoi contains all six words, three at line-ends and three embedded within the lines.

Elizabeth Bishop's A Miracle for Breakfast demonstrates the sestina's capacity for controlled obsession, its six end-words circling through scenes of poverty and hope with a relentlessness that mirrors the characters' daily repetition. Ezra Pound's Sestina: Altaforte uses the form's martial rotation to capture a troubadour's bloodlust, the recurring words hammering like weapons. In contemporary poetry, Jonah Winter's Sestina: Bob brilliantly subverts the form by using the same word, "Bob," for all six end-words, turning the sestina's repetitive architecture into absurdist comedy. These examples reveal the sestina's remarkable range: it can be deadly serious, playfully ironic, or experimentally radical, depending on the poet's choice of end-words and subject.

Writing a sestina begins with selecting your six end-words, and this choice will determine the poem's success or failure. Choose words that are versatile enough to function in multiple syntactic roles and semantic contexts: words that can serve as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, or words with multiple meanings, will give you the flexibility you need across six stanzas. Concrete, monosyllabic words often work best. Avoid abstractions that will feel vague by the third repetition. Once your end-words are chosen, map out the rotation pattern and draft each stanza with attention to how the recurring words create new juxtapositions and meanings as they shift positions. The sestina teaches a valuable lesson about constraint and creativity: the form's rigid requirements force discoveries that free composition might never produce.