Sestina
Quick answer: Sestina guide: six end words, six stanzas, one envoi. The 39-line troubadour form explained, with word-choice advice for writing your own sestina.
The sestina replaces rhyme with a stranger music: six words that end the lines of the first stanza return as the end words of every stanza after it, reshuffled by a fixed spiral until, thirty-nine lines later, they have occupied every position and met every neighbour. Readers feel the repetition before they can name it, like recognising a face without recalling where you met.
The form was invented in the late twelfth century by Arnaut Daniel, the Occitan troubadour whom Dante placed in Purgatory and saluted as the better craftsman, a phrase Eliot later borrowed to dedicate The Waste Land to Pound. Dante and Petrarch both wrote sestinas; the English tradition runs from Sidney through Swinburne to a twentieth-century boom that included Pound's snarling 'Sestina: Altaforte', Elizabeth Bishop's quiet, devastating 'Sestina', and Ashbery's surreal 'The Painter'.
The machinery
Everything follows from one permutation, applied five times.
Choosing the six words
The sestina is won or lost before line one, in the choice of end words. The classic advice: pick words that flex. Nouns that are also verbs ('watch', 'break', 'light') multiply your options; words with several senses ('bank', 'leaves', 'still') let meaning migrate; and homophone cheats ('sea/see', 'pane/pain') are a venerable tradition rather than a crime. Avoid words so distinctive that their sixth appearance clangs ('chandelier' will hurt you) and words so bland they vanish ('thing' wastes a slot). Bishop's six, house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, tears, show another strategy: ordinary domestic nouns whose repetition builds a sealed world.
Drafting one
Write the permutation grid in your notebook before drafting, all six stanzas mapped, so you always know which word ends the line you are writing. Then draft quickly, sentence by sentence, letting syntax run across line breaks; enjambment hides the machinery and keeps end words from thudding. When a word will not fit, change the sentence rather than the word, or let the word shift sense or part of speech. The envoi should not summarise; treat it as the place where the six words, exhausted by circling, finally say the thing the poem has been avoiding. Expect a first draft to take one long sitting; momentum matters more than polish in a form this long.
What it suits, and the padding problem
Sestinas suit obsession, memory, arguments that will not resolve, and any experience where the same few elements keep recombining: a family kitchen, a hospital ward, a chess game, a breakup replayed. The form thinks in loops, so give it looping material.
Beginners pad. Faced with a required end word, they bolt on a limp clause to reach it, and six stanzas of bolted clauses read like a hostage statement. The cure is ruthless: if a line exists only to deliver its end word, rewrite the sentence so the word arrives on business. The end words should feel like magnets the sentences are drawn to, not nails the lines are hung on.
What poets can take from this
- Choose end words that double as noun and verb or carry several senses.
- Map the full 6-1-5-2-4-3 grid before writing a line.
- Enjamb freely; run-on syntax hides the repetition's machinery.
- Let end words change sense or part of speech as stanzas pass.
- Draft the whole poem in one sitting, then revise slowly.
- Read Bishop's 'Sestina' to see domestic words build a world.
Try it yourself
Write a sestina set in a launderette using the end words 'coins', 'turn', 'water', 'wear', 'light' and 'home', letting at least two of them change meaning by the envoi.
Questions
What is the pattern of a sestina?
Six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoi. Six end words rotate by the permutation 6-1-5-2-4-3 from stanza to stanza, and the envoi uses all six words, two per line.
Does a sestina have to rhyme?
No. The sestina replaces rhyme with end-word repetition. Some poets add metre, usually iambic pentameter in English, but neither rhyme nor strict metre is required.
Who invented the sestina?
Arnaut Daniel, an Occitan troubadour of the late twelfth century. Dante admired him enough to write sestinas himself and to call him the better craftsman in the Divine Comedy.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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