She cuts some bread and says to the child,. It's time for tea now ; but the child. Tidying up, the old grandmother. Birdlike, the almanac. She shivers and says she thinks the house. It was to be, says the Marvel Stove. I know what I know , says the almanac. With crayons the child draws a rigid house. Then the child. But secretly, while the grandmother. Time to plant tears , says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove. How to Write a Sestina Sestinas require you to write 6-line stanzas using the following patterns for the end words of your lines.
Directions for a sestina: Pick 6 end words -- try to choose words that have multiple meanings, or that evoke a mood, place, or season. 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. What is a sestina, and what is the sestina used for? How can such a complex and difficult form be used by a poet to express things effectively? Poets as varied as Sir Philip Sidney, Elizabeth Bishop, and Algernon Charles Swinburne have left their mark on this most challenging, and yet rewarding, of poetic forms. The best way to understand how a sestina is constructed is to observe an example of the form.
To the dim light and the large circle of shade I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills, There where we see no colour in the grass. Natheless my longing loses not its green, It has so taken root in the hard stone Which talks and hears as though it were a lady. The metre here mainly iambic pentameter in this case, as in most English sestinas is less important than the ends of the lines, which provide us with the six words which will recur throughout the sestina.
Utterly frozen is this youthful lady, Even as the snow that lies within the shade; For she is no more moved than is the stone By the sweet season which makes warm the hills And alters them afresh from white to green Covering their sides again with flowers and grass.
So whereas in the first stanza we had shade hills grass green stone lady , now we get lady shade stone hills green grass. This order is not random. The idea is that end-word 6 in stanza 1 becomes end-word 1 in stanza 2, and then for the other five lines of stanza 2, the poet follows a strict order which involves going to the top of stanza 1 to end-word 1 to give us shade for end-word 2 of our new stanza; then to end-word 5 of stanza 1 for our new third line stone , then back to the top to end-word 2 to give us our new fourth line hills , then to end-word 4 for our fifth line green , and then finally, end-word 3 of our first stanza, grass , provides us with the sixth end-word for stanza 2.
By now, you can see where this is going: the end-word at the end of the last line of the previous stanza always provides the first end-word for the next stanza, so since grass ended our second stanza, we know that the first line of stanza 3 will end with grass too:. When on her hair she sets a crown of grass The thought has no more room for other lady, Because she weaves the yellow with the green So well that Love sits down there in the shade,— Love who has shut me in among low hills Faster than between walls of granite-stone.
And, as Harry Hill would say, you get the idea with that. So the form continues, until the whole cycle has worked its way around, once six stanzas have been written. So shade , the end-word for the very first line of the poem, now ends the last line of the sixth stanza. Read on, and you will learn how to write a sestina, one of the more remarkable poetry types. A sestina is a long poem, with seven stanzas. The first six stanzas have six lines apiece while the 7th stanza has three lines. In a sestina, the last words of each line are strictly ordered and then re-ordered.
Sestinas, in their basic form, have a meter but do not rhyme. However, they do have a pattern with each line ending in a set word.
Need a different visual? Do you notice what happened? Then, in a slow sandwich movement, it flipped up to A, then down to E —a slow yet very consistent alternating of words. Here is the first stanza in Sestina of the Tramp-Royal by Rudyard Kipling, with the key words in bold.
Kipling lays out his words: all, world, good, long, done, die. In the next stanza he will follow the sestina order and reverse them. This kind of wordplay is allowed and even encouraged in sestinas! Starting to make sense? The sestina form will sink in and start fitting together as you keep reading. The envoi uses three, or all six, of the designated words in an alternating pattern determined by the poet. Traditionally the envoi concluded with 5, 3, 1, or to use our letter example, E, C, and A, bringing the sestina full circle at its conclusion.
The resulting poem is constrained yet allows room for creativity and wit. Sestinas can be playful or sober. The repetition of words lends itself both to tongue-in-cheek narrative and to sinister foreboding.
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