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The what?

The sestina is a fairly old poetic form, dating back to the 12th century or earlier. (This isn’t a history lesson, so we won’t delve into its creator and evolution.) It has seven stanzas, the first six of which have six lines each. The seventh stanza is a tercet (three lines) to tie it all together. All 39 of these lines are usually in iambic pentameter, although they don’t have to be (more on that later). That’s the basic structure - but of course that’s not all there is to it.

The real challenge of the sestina comes from the line endings. Rather than using rhyming words like many poems, sestinas contain six fixed line-ending words. That is, the words at the end of each line of the first stanza (six of them) are then used to end every line in the poem. Based on the original order they’re in (1 2 3 4 5 6), the words follow a specific pattern throughout the other stanzas:

First stanza: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Second: 6 1 5 2 4 3
Third: 3 6 4 1 2 5
Fourth: 5 3 2 6 1 4
Fifth: 4 5 1 3 6 2
Sixth: 2 4 6 5 3 1

The final tercet uses all six words, two per line. Usually, the pattern is 2 5, 4 3, 6 1, but there are many variations on this stanza.

That’s all there is for weird form bits. There’s no need to memorize the pattern; just understand that there will be six “keywords” recurring throughout the poem in a set pattern, and have a chart like this one handy when you start writing. My usual strategy is to write the first stanza, then use this chart to fill in the keywords for the other stanzas before I try to write the rest.

Can we have an example?

Because the sestina may be hard to wrap your head around, and to showcase the power of the form, let’s look at a completed sestina. We’ll use one of the most famous examples. Written by Elizabeth Bishop, it’s titled simply “Sestina.”

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Wow. Let that sink in for a moment, then we’ll move on.

Wait, you said iambic pentameter!

Indeed - most sestinas are written in iambic pentameter, but this rule isn’t set in stone. Many modern poets, like Ms. Bishop, choose not to use a specific meter. That said, her lines still tend to be between eight and twelve syllables, and it’s usually best to follow this example and keep each line close to ten. Decasyllabic lines strike a good balance: They’re short enough that your keywords stay powerful and central to the poem, but long enough that you can add other meaningful material around them.

How do I make my keywords work?

That’s a bit of a complicated question. To start answering, let’s look back at our example. Here are the six keywords from “Sestina”:

house
grandmother
child
stove
almanac
tears

When I look at these six words, the first thing I notice is that they are all nouns. Not only that, but they’re concrete nouns - each one of them is a physical object that I can picture. This is not strictly necessary for a good sestina, but it certainly helps both the poet and the reader: It’s easy to write lines/phrases that end with nouns, and it’s easy to identify with a poem if you can find a physical connection with it. For a first sestina, try to make at least four or five of your keywords nouns.

The next thing to note is that the picture these six words form is quite coherent. An almanac could be in a room with a stove; a child could be in a house; a grandmother could shed tears; and so on. If one or more of the words was separate from the others (say, train instead of stove), it would be harder to paint one consistent picture. Make sure that your keywords work not only individually, but together as a whole.

A final note about these keywords is that out of the six, five have no particular emotional connotation - but the sixth does. Most of the emotional content of the poem comes from the way the keywords are used, not the keywords themselves. That sixth word serves to keep the emotional tone more consistent. Again, this is not a strict rule, but one emotional keyword out of six is a good guideline to follow.

What about the final tercet?

As you can see, “Sestina” doesn’t follow the traditional pattern of keywords (2 5 4 3 6 1) in its final tercet. It uses 6 5 2 4 3 1, and that pattern doesn’t take anything away from the poem. The final tercet is important only in that it reiterates the six keywords in a very compact form; the order of the words isn’t crucial. Very few modern poets use the traditional form of the tercet - some use all six in their original order, or reverse order, or an order of their own choosing as seen here. All that matters for this stanza is that you use all six keywords, and that you don’t deviate too far from the meter of the first six stanzas. That way, the tercet functions as a tidy little ribbon tying the poem together, without being too separate.