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How to Write a Sestina: Six Words, Six Stanzas
A sestina repeats six words instead of a rhyme. Six stanzas of six lines are held together by those words, each stanza ending its lines in a new order, and a three-line envoi closes the poem. Nothing has to rhyme.
What a Sestina Is
The form goes back to twelfth-century Provençal poetry and reached English through Renaissance translators in the sixteenth century. The design is simple to state and stubborn to write. Choose six words. End each line of the first stanza with one of them, in any order — that opening order becomes the fixed list for the rest of the poem. From then on the order rotates by rule, so no two stanzas close the same way.
There is no rhyme scheme and no metre, and line lengths are usually free. The music comes from the returns: a word disappears for five lines, reappears in a new position, and carries whatever the poem has done to it since.
The Rules at a Glance
| Element | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Stanzas | Six stanzas of six lines |
| Envoi | Three lines at the end |
| Total lines | Thirty-nine |
| End-words | Six chosen words, one at each line end |
| Order | Fixed rotation, the same in every stanza |
| Rhyme | Not required |
The Rotation Order
Number your six words 1 to 6 in the order they end the first stanza's lines. Each later stanza reorders the previous one by a single rule: take the first, then the last, then the second, then the second from last, then the middle pair.
| Stanza | Order of end-words |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 |
| 2 | 6 · 1 · 5 · 2 · 4 · 3 |
| 3 | 3 · 6 · 4 · 1 · 2 · 5 |
| 4 | 5 · 3 · 2 · 6 · 1 · 4 |
| 5 | 4 · 5 · 1 · 3 · 6 · 2 |
| 6 | 2 · 4 · 6 · 5 · 3 · 1 |
Write the numbers down the margin before you begin. The envoi works differently: three lines must carry all six words, so each holds two, one worked into the line and one at its end. Pairings are described in different ways; the example below takes the pairs in order — 1 and 2, then 3 and 4, then 5 and 6 — with the second word of each pair closing the line.
Choosing Six End-Words
The end-words decide whether the poem can be written at all, so give them the first ten minutes rather than the last.
- They must bend. A word that is only ever a noun gives six noun endings in a row; water can be a noun or a verb, and stone a noun, verb or adjective.
- They must be concrete. Abstract words such as hope arrive in the same sentence shape each time, and the repetition turns mechanical rather than musical.
- They must belong together without being synonyms. Six words from one small scene — a kitchen, a road, a garden — let the poem stay in one place while the sense shifts.
Writing a Sestina in Five Steps
- Choose six words and number them, testing each in two parts of speech first.
- Draft stanza 1 as prose: six ordinary sentences about your subject, one per end-word. This gives you a spine of sense to draw on later.
- Fill in the rotation table first, writing the six numbers for each stanza down the margin, and never improvise the order mid-stanza.
- Write the middle stanzas loosely. The end-word comes first and the sentence is built backwards from it.
- Save the envoi for last, then read the poem aloud; hearing the returns shows where a word has gone stale.
An Original Sestina
The example below uses six words — water, window, stone, letter, wait and winter — and follows the rotation table above. It was written for this guide.
The kettle keeps its heat like standing water and fogs the pane, and blurs the kitchen window; my mother sets the new bread on the stone and somewhere in the dresser is a letter she has not opened. Bread must rise. We wait. Outside, without a sound, it turns to winter. The first hard cold came early that winter and froze the pump and turned the tap's thin water to iron. Every morning we would wait for steam to climb the glass and clear the window, and then she read the post. That week a letter arrived, and in the yard a bird, grey as the stone. She read it twice and laid it on the stone beside the salt. The farm was sold last winter, she said; the fields, the barn. The letter said nothing of the well, the roof, the water, but listed figures, sums, a date, a window of ninety days. We had no time to wait. I asked her what would happen if we wait. She wiped the flour from the working stone and looked out through the softening of the window the way she looked at weather, or at winter, as if it were a debt, and poured the water, and put the kettle on, and read the letter. There is a kind of patience in a letter that holds no answer, only wait, and days you spend reheating the same water while flour dries to a skin across the stone and April is a rumour, and a winter, and the only moving thing is in the window. I stood a long time at the window and thought about an older, folded letter from before the war, before a winter took half the village, and before the wait that left a name worn flat into a stone and left a well still tasting of its water. So the water is a face behind the window, she reads the stone instead of the letter, and learns to wait the way a house learns winter.
Read the end-words down the right-hand side and the rotation is visible. Notice too that the words change jobs: window is a physical pane before it becomes a period of ninety days, and water shifts from a noun to something wider. That drift only happens if the words were chosen loosely enough to move.
Sestina, Villanelle and Pantoum
Three repeating forms are often confused, and the difference lies in what repeats. A villanelle or a triolet repeats whole lines and is built around rhyme; a pantoum carries whole lines forward the way a sestina carries words.
| Form | What repeats | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| Sestina | Six end-words, rotating | 6 stanzas of 6 lines, then a 3-line envoi |
| Villanelle | Two whole lines, alternating | 5 tercets, then a quatrain |
| Pantoum | Whole lines, reused in the next stanza | Any number of quatrains |
If you are still choosing between fixed forms, the guide to choosing a poetic form compares the sestina with shorter patterns such as the cinquain.
Where Beginners Go Wrong
- Choosing weak end-words. Six nouns, or six words that mean nearly the same thing, produce six stanzas that say one thing each.
- Improvising the rotation. The pattern is easy to remember wrongly; check each stanza against the table.
- Forcing the sentence backwards. Building every line from its end-word makes the poem sound like a crossword clue.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sestina?
A sestina is a poem of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoi. Six chosen words end the lines, and their order rotates by fixed rule, so the same words close each stanza differently.
Does a sestina have to rhyme?
Most sestinas do not rhyme. The form is held together by the repeating end-words, and the oldest examples in English are unrhymed. Rhyme on top of the rotation is allowed but makes the poem far harder to finish.
How long is a sestina?
Thirty-nine lines in the standard form: six stanzas of six lines, then a three-line envoi. Some writers add a seventh stanza, at the cost of breaking the rotation.
Can the same end-word appear twice in one line?
It can, and in the envoi it must, because three lines carry six words. Inside the main stanzas it is best avoided, since a second appearance blurs which word is closing the line.
How do you choose the six end-words?
Pick words that shift between noun, verb and adjective, and avoid words that work in only one position. Concrete words such as water, stone or window survive six stanzas better than abstract ones.