Double Sestina
Quick answer: Double sestina explained: Sidney's 75-line and Swinburne's 150-line versions, how the end words cycle through both, and how to attempt the marathon form.
If the sestina is a long-distance run, the double sestina is the event almost nobody enters twice. The name covers two different monsters, and it helps to know which one you are facing. The first, Sir Philip Sidney's version, keeps the sestina's six end words but doubles the stanzas: twelve sestets plus a tercet, seventy-five lines in which each word ends twelve lines and then a thirteenth. His 'Ye Goatherd Gods', from the Old Arcadia (around 1580), is the masterpiece: two shepherds trade stanzas of cosmic complaint, and the six words are ground down like stones in a river.
The second version doubles everything. Algernon Charles Swinburne's 'The Complaint of Lisa' (1870) uses twelve end words in twelve twelve-line stanzas plus a six-line envoi, one hundred and fifty lines, and he rhymed it as well, an act of showing off that has scarcely been repeated. Scholars apply the term double sestina to both designs, and both are legitimately claimed.
The two architectures
The Sidney model is the more approachable and the more often meant.
What doubling does to repetition
A single sestina lets each end word appear seven times, which is enough to make it strange. Doubling pushes each word past the point of strangeness into something like trance. By a word's tenth appearance the reader has stopped noticing it as repetition and started experiencing it as fate; Sidney exploits this by making his shepherds' grief feel geological, wearing the same six words down through seventy-five lines. This is the form's real subject: exhaustion, endurance, the mind that cannot stop. It is not twice a sestina; it is a different psychological instrument.
Attempting one
Everything that matters in a sestina matters double here. Choose end words of maximum flexibility, nouns that verb, words with three or four senses, because each must survive around thirteen appearances. Consider Sidney's other structural gift: two speakers. Splitting the stanzas between voices, as 'Ye Goatherd Gods' does, refreshes the repetition each time the perspective flips, and gives you a dramatic reason for the circling. Map the full permutation grid for all twelve stanzas before you start, draft in multiple sittings with the grid pinned in view, and accept that stanzas eight to ten will feel like the wall marathon runners describe. Plan a development arc in advance: decide what each word will come to mean by the end, so the second cycle deepens the first instead of replaying it.
Who should write one, and the obvious trap
The double sestina suits grief that time refuses to process, obsession, drought, chronic illness, waiting. It is also, frankly, a craft rite of passage: poets attempt it to find out what their language does under sustained pressure, and finishing one, even a flawed one, permanently changes how you handle end words.
The trap needs no subtlety to describe: length without development. If the second cycle of stanzas merely repeats the first cycle's meanings, you have written the same sestina twice and stapled it. Every end word must travel; a reader comparing a word's second appearance with its twelfth should be able to measure how far the poem has moved.
What poets can take from this
- Decide first which model you are writing: Sidney's six words or Swinburne's twelve.
- Choose end words that can each survive thirteen appearances.
- Consider two alternating speakers to refresh the repetition.
- Map every stanza's end-word order before drafting anything.
- Plan how each word's meaning will have changed by the envoi.
- Draft across several sittings and expect the middle stanzas to fight you.
Try it yourself
Write the first two stanzas of a Sidney-model double sestina about a drought, spoken alternately by a farmer and a river, using the end words 'rain', 'stone', 'wait', 'field', 'mouth' and 'years'.
Questions
What is a double sestina?
The name covers two forms: Sidney's version, twelve six-line stanzas cycling six end words twice plus a tercet, and Swinburne's version, twelve twelve-line stanzas using twelve end words plus a six-line envoi.
What are famous examples of the double sestina?
Sir Philip Sidney's 'Ye Goatherd Gods' from the Old Arcadia and Swinburne's rhymed 'The Complaint of Lisa' are the two landmarks. Very few others exist, which is part of the form's mystique.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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