Envoi
Quick answer: An envoi is the short closing stanza of forms like the ballade and sestina, sending the poem off with a final address. Learn how to write one well.
An envoi, sometimes spelled envoy, is the short concluding stanza that ends certain fixed forms, most famously the ballade and the sestina, and it traditionally addresses the poem's dedicatee while gathering up the poem's key words or refrain. The name comes from the French for a sending: the envoi is the poem waving itself off, delivering its cargo to a named reader. In the medieval ballade it conventionally begins by addressing a prince, a habit left over from poetry competitions judged by actual nobility.
The envoi solves a problem every poet knows: how to end. Fixed forms generate momentum, and stopping them dead feels abrupt. The envoi acts as a landing strip, half the length of a normal stanza, where the poem slows, turns to face someone, and says its business plainly. Learning to write one teaches you compression, address and closure all at once.
How It Works
In a ballade, the envoi is usually four lines to the stanzas' eight, keeps the rhyme scheme's second half, and ends with the same refrain line that closed every stanza. In a sestina, the envoi, also called the tornada, is three lines that must contain all six of the poem's rotating end words, two per line. Either way the mechanics force a summary: the poem's most loaded words crowd into its smallest room. An invented ballade-style envoi shows the gesture: Prince of the late train and the missed goodbye, take these four stanzas as my alibi: I loved the leaving more than I could say. The river does not ask the rain to stay.
Where You Will See It
François Villon's ballades are the classic models, their envois turning from confession to direct appeal. Chaucer wrote free-standing envoy poems to friends, including his envoys to Scogan and Bukton. Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Victorian ballade revivalists kept the prince address alive as a game, and Ezra Pound titled a famous lyric simply Envoi as a deliberate nod to the tradition of the poem that sends itself into the world. Modern sestinas almost always keep their three-line envoi, even when poets loosen every other rule.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Even outside fixed forms, you can borrow the envoi as a closing move: shorten the final stanza, turn to address someone by name or title, and let one earlier phrase return. The shift from description to direct speech is what makes it land. Endings carry disproportionate weight with readers and with judges, and a Writory scorer reading two hundred poems in a week will remember the one that turned at the last moment and spoke to somebody. Keep it brief; an envoi that runs as long as a stanza is just another stanza.
What poets can take from this
- Write the envoi last, after you know what the poem actually turned out to be about.
- In a sestina envoi, place the six end words in an order that sounds inevitable when read aloud, and bend the traditional order if the sentence demands it.
- Resist explaining the poem in the envoi; send it, do not summarise it.
- Try addressing an unexpected prince: a landlord, a weather system, a younger self.
- If your free-verse poem ends limply, test a three-line envoi that gathers its three strongest nouns.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of three stanzas about something you posted, sent or shipped and never heard about again. End with a four-line envoi addressed to whoever received it, using one phrase repeated from earlier in the poem.
Questions
What is the difference between an envoi and an epilogue?
An epilogue is a closing section of any length in any genre, usually reflective. An envoi is a specific short stanza convention in poetry, tied to forms like the ballade and sestina, and it traditionally addresses a dedicatee while reusing the poem's refrain or key words.
Why do ballade envois address a prince?
Medieval French poetry competitions were often presided over by a noble patron who judged the entries, so poets aimed their final stanza at him. The address became a fixed convention, and later poets kept the word prince as an affectionate formality.
Does a sestina have to end with an envoi?
Traditionally yes: three lines containing all six end words. Contemporary poets sometimes drop or shrink it, but most keep it because the form's spiralling repetition needs a gathering gesture to feel finished.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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