What Is a Sestina?

A sestina is thirty-nine lines long, split into six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a final three-line stanza called an envoi. There's no rhyme scheme anywhere in it. Instead, the poet picks six words at the very start, the end word of every line in the first stanza, and those same six words have to reappear as the end words of every stanza that follows, in a specific rotating order, all the way through to the envoi, where all six get packed into just three lines. It sounds like a puzzle because it is one, and it's one of the strangest, most stubborn forms still in regular use.

The Pattern Nobody Remembers on the First Try

Here's the part that trips almost everyone up the first time they try to write one. The six end words don't repeat in the same order each stanza. They rotate according to a fixed pattern, where the last word of the previous stanza becomes the first word of the next, the second to last becomes the second, and so on, spiraling inward and back out again. Number the six words 1 through 6 in the order they appear in stanza one, and stanza two runs 6-1-5-2-4-3. Stanza three takes that new order and does the same thing to itself, and so on for six stanzas. Nobody memorizes this pattern by staring at the numbers. Poets memorize it by writing the poem, which is sort of the whole point of the form.

Watching It Work: Ezra Pound

Theory only gets you so far with a form like this, so here's the pattern actually running. Ezra Pound's "Sestina: Altaforte", written in 1909, gives voice to a medieval warlord who despises peace and lives for the sound of battle. The first stanza ends on peace, music, clash, opposing, crimson, and rejoicing. Watch what happens next.

Rejoicing, which closed the first stanza, now opens the second. Peace, which opened the whole poem, slides down to second to last. Every word is doing exactly what the pattern demands and somehow none of it reads like a word search. Pound uses the mechanical repetition to make the speaker sound half unhinged, a man so obsessed with war that his own vocabulary keeps circling back on itself no matter what he's actually describing, which is a genuinely clever use of a form that could easily have felt like a math exercise instead.

Why Anyone Still Bothers

The honest answer is that the sestina is a machine for finding things you didn't know you meant to say. Pick six words casually enough and you'll be forced, by line thirty or so, to use one of them in a context you never would have chosen on your own, and that forced context is often where the real poem shows up. It's a form that rewards picking end words with some flexibility in them, words that can be a noun in one stanza and a verb in another, rather than words locked into a single narrow meaning. The poets who write the best sestinas tend to treat the constraint less like a cage and more like a difficult conversation partner, one that keeps steering the poem somewhere it wouldn't have gone alone.

Trying One Yourself

Pick six words you can imagine using in more than one sense. Concrete nouns work better than abstractions, since a word like water can be a noun, a verb, or half a compound word by the fourth stanza, while a word like sorrow mostly just means sorrow no matter where you put it. Write the pattern out numerically before you start, since trying to hold the rotation in your head while also writing good lines is a genuinely difficult trick even for people who've done it before. And don't expect the first stanza to be the strongest one. In a sestina, the poem usually only finds its real subject once the constraint has had a few stanzas to push back.

About the author

G. K. Allum

Poet & Founding Editor

G. K. Allum is the founder and executive editor of Ink and Ribbon Press. He is completing an MFA in poetry at Pacific University, where his project the Domestic Sonnets explores long term partnership through the Triptych Sonnet, a form of his own invention. He writes across The Poetry Library.