A sestina (Occitan: [sesˈtinɔ]; Catalan: sextina, IPA: [sə(k)sˈtinə] or [se(k)sˈtina]; also known as sestine, sextine or sextain) is a structured 39 line poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by an envoi of three lines. The words that end each line of the first stanzas are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern. It is a 12th century Provençal form still popular today.
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If the lines of the first stanza are numbered 123456 and we take the words that end the line, the line ending words of the second stanza appear in the order 615243. The lines of the third stanza end 364125, the fourth 532614, the fifth 451362, and finally 246531. These six ending words then appear in a closing set (envoi) of three lines (a tercet) with the first line usually containing 6 and 2, its second 1 and 4, and its third 5 and 3, but other versions exist.
What some consider a "double sestina" is similar in structure to a sestina, but uses a pattern of twelve repeating end-words, reordered through twelve stanzas, with a six-line envoi. The end-word order returns to the starting sequence in the eleventh stanza; thus it does not, unlike the “single” sestina, allow for every end-word to occupy each of the stanza ends; end-words 5 and 10 fail to couple between stanzas.
"Paysage Moralisé"
Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,
Seeing at end of street the barren mountains,
Round corners coming suddenly on water,
Knowing them shipwrecked who were launched for islands,
We honour founders of these starving cities
Whose honour is the image of our sorrow,
Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow
That brought them desperate to the brink of valleys;
Dreaming of evening walks through learned cities
They reined their violent horses on the mountains,
Those fields like ships to castaways on islands,
Visions of green to them who craved for water.
The sestina was invented in the late 12th century by the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel. Elements of it were quickly imitated by other troubadours, such as Guilhem Peire Cazals de Caortz.
The oldest British example of the form is a pair of sestinas (frequently referred to as a double sestina), "Ye Goat-Herd Gods", written by Philip Sidney. Writers such as Dante, Petrarca, A. C. Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Joan Brossa, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Muldoon and Joe Haldeman are all noted for having written sestinas of some fame.