How Does a Sestina Work?
Quick answer: How does a sestina work? Thirty-nine lines built on six repeating end words that rotate through six stanzas in a fixed spiral, then return in a final tercet.
A sestina is a thirty-nine-line poem that repeats six end words instead of rhyming. The same six words end the lines of all six stanzas, rotating in a fixed spiral pattern, and then all six appear in a closing three-line envoi. No rhyme scheme, no required metre, just that relentless recycling of word endings.
The rotation is not random. Each new stanza takes the previous stanza's end words in the order 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3, so the last end word of one stanza becomes the first end word of the next. Invented by the twelfth-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel and admired by Dante, the sestina survives because that spiral creates a strange, dreamlike insistence, the same six ideas turning over and over like worry beads.
The rotation, written out
Number your six end words 1 to 6 as they appear in stanza one. The full scheme runs as follows, with the envoi using two end words per line (one mid-line, one at the end).
Choosing the six words
The whole game is won or lost here. You want words flexible enough to survive six or seven appearances without embarrassment. Concrete nouns that double as verbs are gold: light, hand, water, cross, fall, break. Abstractions like love or eternity turn leaden by stanza three, and rare showy words become a running joke you did not intend.
Elizabeth Bishop's 'Sestina' uses house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac and tears, ordinary words that build an entire domestic world of held-back grief. That is the model: modest words, deep pressure. Some poets also allow homophones or shifted forms (bear the animal, bear the verb) which is generally accepted as fair play.
A worked micro-example
Say your six words are salt, door, brother, water, night and hands. Stanza one might open: 'The ferry crossing tasted mostly of salt. / You waited on the wrong side of the door. / I had not called you brother / in six years, and between us lay the water.' Stanza two must then end its first line on water's stanza-mate under the rotation, and so on. Notice how the words start generating plot on their own: salt wants the sea or a wound, door wants arrival or refusal.
That is the sestina's secret. You do not so much write it as negotiate with it, and the negotiation often drags up material you would never have reached in free verse.
Keeping thirty-nine lines alive
The common failure is padding: lines that exist only to reach their mandatory end word. Fight it by letting sentences run across line breaks, so end words fall mid-sentence and stop feeling like fence posts. Vary line length. Let the poem's situation evolve, a sestina that describes the same scene six times will bore everyone including you. If you enter one in a contest, expect the structure score to reward the form only when the language score survives it; a sestina that reads naturally aloud is rarer than one that merely follows the chart.
What poets can take from this
- Pick six ordinary, flexible end words, and favour nouns that can also work as verbs.
- Write the end-word grid for all seven stanzas before drafting a single line.
- Run sentences across line breaks so the repeated words stop announcing themselves.
- Let the situation change between stanzas: new time, new speaker, new room.
- Allow homophones and word-form shifts when they earn their keep.
- Draft fast and revise slow; sestinas improve most in the second pass, when you rewrite the padded lines.
Try it yourself
Write a sestina using these six end words: map, salt, mother, engine, dark, hands. Set each pair of stanzas in a different decade of one family's life.
Questions
How many lines are in a sestina?
Thirty-nine: six stanzas of six lines each, plus a three-line envoi. The envoi must contain all six repeating end words, usually two per line.
Does a sestina rhyme?
No. The sestina replaces rhyme with lexical repetition: the same six words end the lines of every stanza in a rotating order. Metre is optional too, though many poets keep lines roughly even.
What is the envoi in a sestina?
The envoi is the closing tercet. Its three lines fold all six end words together, traditionally one mid-line and one at the end of each line, giving the spiral a final knot.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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