The Sestina

A sestina is thirty-nine lines in a fixed pattern: six stanzas of six lines and a closing tercet. There is no rhyme. Instead, six words repeat at the ends of the lines in a set order, and the poem becomes the story of those words changing what they mean. The rotation is fixed. Number the end-words of the first stanza one to six. The second stanza's lines end 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3. The third: 3, 6, 4, 1, 2, 5. The fourth: 5, 3, 2, 6, 1, 4. The fifth: 4, 5, 1, 3, 6, 2. The sixth: 2, 4, 6, 5, 3, 1. The closing tercet, called the envoi, uses all six words again, three of them at the ends of its lines and three inside them. The form comes from the Provençal troubadours and settled into English through Sir Philip Sidney. Poets keep writing sestinas because the pattern makes connections nobody would plan: a word pulled through six contexts cannot stay simple. Distinguishing characteristics - Six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoi: thirty-nine lines. - Six end-words, repeated in the fixed rotation, never rhyming. - No line may end on any word but its assigned one. - The envoi gathers all six words one last time. A complete original example, written for this platform The morning comes the way it always does, with rain that finds the gutter first and then my hand held out to test the weather at the door. I do not turn the kitchen's single light on yet. I let the grey deliver word by word, and put the kettle next to bread. The kettle next to bread is company enough against the rain, and the radio is rehearsing its first word while I stand with the pot in my hand and watch the wall go slowly into light, the hall, the mat, the letters at the door. The letters at the door are bills, and one from her, and the bread is going stale; I hold it to the light as if a loaf could hold a week of rain and hear the kettle arguing in my hand and put it down without another word. Another word would only echo down the hall and out the door. I set the cup where my hand can find it, and I cut the bread and listen to the ordinary rain and let the morning do its work with light. This is the work of light: to make a plain thing legible, a word legible, a window into rain, a hallway into passage, a door into a promise. Take the bread. Take what the morning puts into your hand. Take what the morning puts into your hand, the cup, the pen, the grey that will be light, and make of it a day, and make of bread a table, and of a letter's word an answer, and of an answer an open door that lets in the sound of rain. Let the word be bread, and let the door stay open to the rain, and let the light find my hand. How the example works The six end-words are rain, hand, door, light, word and bread. Read the last word of each line downwards and you can follow the rotation through all six stanzas, and the envoi then carries all six words into three lines. The words do the work the pattern asks of them: 'hand' is first the hand testing weather, then the hand holding a pot, then the hand holding a letter, and last the hand the poem asks to be found. None of that was planned; the pattern made the connections, which is the whole argument for writing one. Exercise to try Choose six plain objects or nouns, since feelings will not survive six appearances. Write out the rotation on a sheet before you write a line and keep it beside you. Compose the first stanza, then work forward, and if a stanza stalls, begin with its end-word and write backwards into the line. Revising it Check every line ends on its assigned word before you consider anything else. Then read the stanzas in order and ask of each repeated word whether it now means something new. Keep the sentence shapes varied, because six lines of the same construction will read as a list, and let the sentences run across the line breaks so the poem can breathe. If a stanza is padding, change the line, never the rotation.