The Sestina was invented by the 12th Century Provencal troubadour Arnaut Daniel.The actual reason or meaning of the repetitive style of the Sestina has unfortunately been lost leaving modern writers and poets with an often frustrating but also rewarding poetical structure that begs to be discovered and explored.

The Sestina has six stanzas of six lines and a final short stanza of three lines to round it off. The same six words end the lines of each stanza (with two end-words in each line of the short final stanza), though in each stanza they are in a different order according to a strict pattern.

This pattern can take longer to come to terms with then the actually writing of the Sestina itself, but don’t be overwhelmed or intimidated. Once you get to grips with it you’ll be rolling out the Sestina’s, playing with words and exploring the possibilities of storytelling!

Choose six words which will bear repetition. Write a lined piece which places these words at the ends of the lines in the following pattern:

This is a great exercise to do in a Writer’s group or workshop. Two people using the same set of words will never end up with the same poem! The stories and images that grow out of the Sestina make it more than worth the while to get to grips with the structure.

Finally here is an example of a Sestina I cooked up earlier (Not the best but just goes to show how influential the words you pick are on the general theme and feel of the poem) using the words: Blue, crunching, sex, fishmonger, bee and illuminate.

The Fishmonger and the Bee

The cities with their cars and people, their flags of blue,
Find over the mountains the trolls are crunching,
With their mad hatter’s dance and cries for sex,
This is truly not the time to be an acrobat or a fishmonger,
These trolls, they are after the pollen like the bee,
And no people will be left for the moon to illuminate.

Have you seen the jovial windows that the candles illuminate?
The sky mid-morning all cloudless and blue?
The flowers blossoming, conversing with the bee?
The cows in their field munching and crunching?
The market on a warm day, enemy to the fishmonger,
Have you felt the joys of this city in its joyful throes of sex?

The world can seem to revolve solely upon sex,
A study on nature will surely illuminate,
Why there is sex for all, for all but a fishmonger,
They smell of their rotting wares and their hands always blue,
Never have they the chance of crunching,
And grinding in the act of the bird and the bee.

‘Here sat me, Bee’,
But no gender, no sex,
I pondered this while crunching,
As the city mayor, unable to illuminate,
Our present situation, took our flags of blue,
And replaced himself with Bob, our fishmonger.

Our new mayor, Bob the fishmonger,
Raised an army against the trolls, they were swatted like me, bee,
I cut one, whilst dodging, spraying blood of blue,
It was cold and couldn’t possibly burn for sex,
It glowed in the night and my home did it illuminate,
As I watched it crumble, the trolls dispersing crunching.

So far now, is the crunching,
Our mayor Bob, now the dead fishmonger,
A trolls hand left behind to illuminate,
How the warning didn’t come from the honey bee,
But from myself and another of my sex,
We saw our future blue.

What can you illuminate? What kind of sex?
All sorts of crunching and all the shades of blue,
What’s the difference between bumble-bee and Bob, the fishmonger?