Sestina

Sestina Form

History.

Historically, the Sestina is a French form. It appeared in France in the twelfth century, initially in the work of Arnaut Daniel. He was one of the troubadours or court poets and singers in the service of French nobles.
Troubadours were lyric poets. They began in Provence in the eleventh century. For the next two centuries, they flourished in South France, East Spain, and North Italy, creating many songs of romantic flirtation and desire. Their name is from the French trobar, to "invent or make verse".
The Sestina was one of several forms in the complex, elaborate, and difficult closed style called trobar clus (as opposed to the easier more open trobar leu).

Form

In a traditional Sestina:

• The lines are grouped into six sestets and a concluding tercet. Thus a Sestina has 39 lines.
• Lines may be of any length. Their length is usually consistent in a single poem.
• The six words that end each of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a different order at the end of lines in each of the subsequent five stanzas. The particular pattern is given below. (This kind of recurrent pattern is "lexical repetition".)
• The repeated words are unrhymed.
• The first line of each sestet after the first ends with the same word as the one that ended the last line of the sestet before it.
• In the closing tercet, each of the six words are used, with one in the middle of each line and one at the end.
• The pattern of word-repetition is as follows, where the words that end the lines of the first sestet are represented by the numbers "1 2 3 4 5 6":

  1 2 3 4 5 6         - End words of lines in first sestet.
  6 1 5 2 4 3         - End words of lines in second sestet.
  3 6 4 1 2 5         - End words of lines in third sestet.
  5 3 2 6 1 4         - End words of lines in fourth sestet.
  4 5 1 3 6 2         - End words of lines in fifth sestet.
  2 4 6 5 3 1         - End words of lines in sixth sestet.
  (6 2) (1 4) (5 3)   - Middle and end words of lines in tercet.