Sestinas

Poetic forms exist as a tradition, a mode of expression within recognizable boundaries.  Forms challenge a poet to present something profound and different within a fixed space.  The sestina is one such form.  Poetic forms have their equivalents in all arts.  For instance, a landscape or portrait is a form of painting while a sonata is a musical form.

The sestina is a form of poetry with a specific pattern of end words.  It is expressed in six stanzas of six lines each plus one stanza of three (sometimes two) lines that incorporate all the end words.  Some sestinas have a varied pattern and also vary in meter.

In the Sestina repetition serves a specific and intentional purpose. Through repetition, the words, lines and stanzas focus the reader’s attention on the theme within the circular repetitions of the poem.  The themes vary, as all poetry does.

The three poems in the sestina archive that most vary from the standard pattern are “Ye wastefull woodes, bear witness of my woe” by Edmund Spenser, The Voices of Spring by Elizabeth Allen and The Complaint of Lisa by Algernon Swinburne. The sestinas by Spenser and Allen vary in the same way.  If you look at the pattern variation you can see that the repetition is more obvious because the repeated words occur closer together than in the regular sestina.  This contributes to a feeling of closed, tighter circles in the poem.  They feel heavy when read which contributes to the themes of sorrow in both.

In Elizabeth Allen's poem, The Voices of Spring, the end words; "spring", "call", "sing", "fall", "bring", and "all" are not words heavy with sorrow.  The rhyme scheme, that would not work without the altered sestina form suggests a light theme.  Yet the few lines that convey sorrow overwhelm the cheerful nature of the words.  The tighter circles achieved by the sestina continually force the reader’s attention back on the underlying sorrow.  The combination produces a bitter sweetness that enhances the poet's theme.

Swinburne’s poem is a double sestina.  A double sestina is comprised of twelve stanzas of twelve lines each and a six-lined envoy.  While the first variation results in an accentuation of repetition through the pattern, the second variation makes the repetition of end words less obvious by spacing them further apart.  Swinburne’s double sestina is still heavy in repetition because it does not only occur in the end words. 

An imitation of Swinburne’s double sestina can be found towards the end of John Ashbery’s “Flowchart”.  Ashbery’s double sestina begins on page one hundred and eighty six of this two hundred and sixteen page poem.  In his double sestina, Ashbery pays tribute to Swinburne by using the exact end words from The Complaint of Lisa.  His purpose for including this form in his poem can be found within the poem itself.  Ashbery writes,

This is my day, even though it belong as well to many who

are dead.

I say it not in a spirit of possessiveness, only as a fact.

Indeed, I pass it to thee

As generations of aspiring lovers and writers before me

have done.(191)

He is using a form to address a theme that has been explored many times before.  He calls attention to the repetition of the theme not only with the repetition of words but by repeating the way Algernon Swinburne had used the form before him.  As he writes in the poem, “Scratching around one is sure to uncover bits of the ancient way”(191).

          Another well known poem is Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina.  This poem tells a story about a grandmother and a child.  Here the story is told about someone who is not there (“…a man with buttons like tears”) and the effect of that loss on the everyday life of the grandmother and child.  This sestina accentuates what is missing with the repetition of the present.  What remains in the daily lives of the grandmother and child are inanimate objects (the “house”, “almanac”, “stove”) and grief (“tears”).  This poem does follow the original sestina pattern but differs from the poems I have discussed here in its tone. 

The poems I have archived here have all the variations described above. They circle around themes of love, sorrow, or conquest.  Some tell a story and some are comical in their repetition.  Some follow the subscribed pattern exactly while others vary slightly or drastically.  Some have a discernible meter and some rhyme.  Despite these variations, all the poems are common in being of one form, a sestina.