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How to Write a Sestina

Ezra Pound, Famous Poets, Petrarch

A sestina is a form of poetry, much like a haiku or sonnet, which has its own set of rules. While most people have never heard of a sestina, it can be a fascinating form to work with for both beginners and experts alike. This article will show you how to create your own sestina by following just a few simple rules.

History

The sestina poem was first created around the time of the 12th century and is believed to have been the brainchild of Arnaut Daniel. Daniel was one of the troubadours, a group of French poets who constantly competed to create increasingly difficult and complex forms of poetry. The form continued to be used by such famous poets as Dante and Petrarch, but fell out of fashion for a time until revived in the 16th century. It is still not an exceedingly common form of poetry, but more recent poets such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rudyard Kipling have all used it in their work.

Writing a Sestina

Unlike other forms such as the sonnet, rhyming is not a key element of a sestina. In fact, most sestinas do not rhyme at all. There are only two things you must do to write your own sestina: choose six words and learn the order in which to place them.

A sestina consists of six stanzas of six lines each (a stanza in poetry being much like a paragraph in an essay or book), with a final seventh stanza (called the envoi in this case) being only three lines.

Instead of using a rhyming scheme for these stanzas like poetry often does, a sestina uses an end-word scheme. To demonstrate this, we’ll use Dante Alighieri’s poem “Sestina” as an example.

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When looking at the first stanza of this piece, the six end words used are the following: shadow, hills, grass, green, stone, and woman. These six words set the order the rest of the poem must follow. For our purpose, we’ll label them each with a letter. A) shadow, B) hills, C) grass, D) green, E) stone, and F) woman.

To write the next stanza we now need to know in what order these words must be placed. A sestina is written by scrambling the order of these six end words for each stanza using the following 615243 order. This means the sixth word of the previous stanza is now the first word of the next stanza. The first word now becomes the second, the fifth now becomes the third, and so on. The easiest way to look at this is to go back to the letters we assigned for each word and write out the pattern to follow.

Stanza 1: ABCDEF
Stanza 2: FAEBDC
Stanza 3: CFDABE
Stanza 4: ECBFAD
Stanza 5: DEACFB
Stanza 6: BDFECA

If you’re wondering what to do with the seventh stanza since you have six words and only three lines, never fear. Each line uses two of your words in the following way:

Stanza 7, Line 1: BE
Stanza 7, Line 2: DC
Stanza 7, Line 3: FA

If you follow this pattern, you’ll have your own sestina written in no time!

As for choosing the six words you want to use, the sky is the limit. Some people try to make sense of the connection between the words they choose. John Frederick Nims writes in his essay The Sestina, “in a good sestina the poet has six words, six images, six ideas so urgently in his mind that he cannot get away from them; he wants to test them in all possible combinations and come to a conclusion about their relationship.

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Other people may choose the first six words that come to mind and see what type of poem can be created using them. The choice is entirely yours!

Examples of Sestinas

If you’re still a bit lost and want to see examples of the sestina pattern, or if you simply want to read some famous examples, look no further. Below are a few links sure to satisfy your appetite!

Dante Alighieri’s “Sestina”
Rudyard Kipling’s “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal”
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”

Alberto Rios, “Sestina,” Forms of Verse
“Admiring Literature: The Mysterious Sestina,” The Structure of Entropy