How to Write a Sestina

This article is for: Beginners and Intermediate, and maybe Advanced poets too!

Like the pantoum, the sestina is a form that makes liberal use of repetition.

As I went over in my article on writing pantoums, repetition appeals strongly to the human mind. Just think about the huge popularity of pop music, which is always based on repetition: repetition of words in the chorus, and repetition of riffs or other patterns in the music.

So it’s not surprising that, like the pantoum, the sestina can create very powerful results.

It’s one of my favorite forms, and there are some truly wonderful sestinas out there to read.

However, the particular type of repetition in the sestina can also create very powerful problems for the poet! And if you’re not sure what you’re doing, you might end up frustrated and despairing.

So in this article, I am to show you:

How to thrive within the sestina’s constraints and love what you make.

What is a traditional sestina?

Let’s start with the basics.

The sestina is a pretty old form—it comes from the 1100s. At that time, minstrel poets wandered the south of France, making up poems to sing for wealthy patrons, hoping to persuade said patrons to feed them. The more impressive the poem, the more likely you were to get a decent supper.

So, in order to show off his skill and inventiveness, one such poet, Arnaut Daniel, invented the sestina.

This is because the traditional sestina is an intricate and demanding form. And when it works it does indeed demonstrate a great deal of creativity and know-how.

Six repeating words

The traditional sestina has 39 lines: six stanzas of 6 lines each, followed by a 3-line stanza to finish it off, called the envoi (pronounced “envoy”).

There is no rhyme, but instead six words are repeated seven times:

Each word appears at the end of 1 line in each of the 6-line stanzas,making the first 6 repeats.
Then in the 3-line envoi, each line contains 2 of the words, one at the end and one anywhere else.

So this is a poem of end-words: six words that keep coming back at the ends of lines.

To make this clearer, here are the first two stanzas of “Ethel’s Sestina” by Patricia Smith. (The speaker of this poem is a 92-year-old woman who died while waiting for rescue outside the New Orleans Convention Center during Hurricane Katrina.)

            Gon’ be obedient in this here chair,
            gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun.
            I ask my boy, and all he says is Wait.
            He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep.
            I trust his every word. Herbert my son.
            I believe him when he says help gon’ come.
            Been so long since all these suffrin’ folks come
            to this place. Now on the ground ’round my chair,
            they sweat in my shade, keep asking my son
            could that be a bus they see. It’s the sun
            foolin’ them, shining much too loud for sleep,
            making us hear engines, wheels. Not yet. Wait.

If you look at the end-words of the first six lines, you’ll see they are:

chair, sun, wait, sleep, son, come.

And these exact same words come back at the ends of the next six lines—only in a different order. And this is where things get more complex...

Rules for the order of the end-words

Throwing the same six words into the poem 7 times each probably already seems like quite a challenge, but Daniel wasn’t finished yet. He also decided that there should be a strict pattern to the repetition of the end-words, like this:

Once a stanza is over, the first end-word of the next stanza is the lastend-word of the previous stanza.

(So in “Ethel’s Sestina,” the first stanza ends with “come,” and the first end-word of the next stanza is also “come.”)

Then the next end-word of the new stanza is the first end-word of the previous stanza.

(In “Ethel’s Sestina,” the first line of the first stanza ends with “chair”; so the second end-word of the second stanza is also “chair.”)

This means we’ve used up the end-words of the first and last line of stanza 1, like this:

            Gon’ be obedient in this here chair,
            gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun.
            I ask my boy, and all he says is Wait.
            He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep.
            I trust his every word. Herbert my son.
            I believe him when he says help gon’ come.

For the next two end-words of stanza 2, we repeat that last-first pattern, using the end-words that are still available.

So the next two end-words of stanza 2 are going to be “son” and then “sun,” since these are the end-words of the outside pair of lines from stanza 1 that remain unused.

            Gon’ be obedient in this here chair,
            gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun.
            I ask my boy, and all he says is Wait.
            He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep.
            I trust his every word. Herbert my son.
            I believe him when he says help gon’ come.

Finally, for the last pair of end-words of stanza 2, we use the two that are left in stanza 1, “sleep” and then “wait.”

Then you repeat this approach for stanza 3, looking back to the positions of the end-words in stanza 2 to guide you. And so on.

In the envoi, you are supposed to use 2 words per line, and the end words should come in the order 6 2, 1 4, 5 3 (where each number is the line the word ended in stanza 1).

Never fear! Sestina help is here!

At this point, it’s entirely understandable if you want to throw up your hands and say, “Are you nuts?! I’m not writing that!”

And yes, I agree: from a distance, attempting a sestina can seem like self-inflicted torture. When you have all the thousands of words in the English language available, why on earth would you make those poor six words keep coming back and back?

And how can you possibly make a decent poem out of them if you do?

That’s what the rest of this email will be about.

The repetition inspires and helps

If you’ve seen my article on Creative Constraints, you’ll probably remember that I talk about how “Constraints set you free.”

But just in case you haven’t, here’s a quick recap.

Your creativity is like a horse munching grass in a field. Most of the time, it’s content to plod around. It likes an easy life!
However, it also likes to move and show its strength. So when someone puts a fence in the field, the horse wants nothing more than to feel itself leaping over it—and off it goes, at a gallop.
The same goes for setting yourself rules or limits (constraints) to follow in a poem. Provided they aren’t too difficult, constraints become a positive challenge, not a block, and your creativity rises to it.

So, this is the first thing that makes a sestina possible, and often wonderful. All those repeated end-words can actually lift you up, giving you energy and ideas that you didn’t know you could have. As you figure out how to use each word 7 times without spouting nonsense, you push yourself to new altitudes.

Or at least, that’s what can happen. I have to be truthful and say that it does not always happen. Sometimes the repetition of the six words does become wooden, and you run out of new ideas, and you struggle to get through the seven stanzas.

But when it does work, it is really magical.

So it’s worth trying, and worth trying more than once, if your first one happens to sink like lead.

Moreover, there are some things you can do to make success more likely, as I shall now cover.

Variations lighten the load

I said earlier that constraints become a positive challenge provided they aren’t too difficult.

If they do become too difficult, that’s like making the fence in the horse’s field 20 feet tall. The horse feels intimidated rather than inspired, and won’t jump.

If that happens, you have to take the fence down some, by relaxing or removing some of the rules.

And that’s exactly what poets have done with the sestina, in various clever ways that you can copy!

1. Use simple end-words

Because those 6 end-words are going to come up a lot in your poem, it’s often helpful if they are plain, ordinary words that tend to come up a lot in English anyway.

Then it’s much easier to use them in 7 different ways, so they still say something meaningful each time.

So words like “run” or “like” or “then” or “hand” are going to be your friends. As you move through the 7 repetitions, you’ll be immensely glad that you’re working with something flexible and ordinary—and not, let’s say, 7 repetitions of “thermometer” or “oxidation”!

Patricia Smith certainly did this in “Ethel’s Sestina”: all of chair, sun, wait, sleep, son, and come are pretty ordinary and flexible.

2. Use end-words that are specific to your topic

Another way to make the repetitions meaningful and possible is to use end-words that are important to the subject or scene that you’re writing about, and so more likely to recur.

Patricia Smith also shows us how this works: Ethel is in a chair, waiting in the sun with her son. All those words are organically connected to the situation of the poem.

So as Ethel keeps looking at her surroundings and thinking about them, it’s natural for those words to keep coming back. This makes the repetition easier for the poet and less obtrusive for the reader.

This approach also allows you to bring in more interesting end-words.After all, “run,” “like,” and “then” are not the most exciting vocabulary in the world!

But if you’re writing about two characters meeting at an airport, for example, then you could plausibly use vocab like “airplane” or “passport” or even "runway" as end-words—without tying yourself up in knots.

3. Use end-words that double up

Another form of end-word that’s very helpful is words that can do two jobs—for example, acting as either noun or verb.

Darla Himeles does this in “Instructions from My Father.” One of her end-words is “face,” and another is “will.”

As well as both being simple, ordinary words, these words also work as both nouns and verbs. Most of the time she uses “face” to mean the thing on the front of your head, but in one place she shifts it to a verb:

            you'll face
            the darkness with new confidence, face
            yourself with new pride.

And she does the reverse with “will”: mostly it’s used as a verb, but in one place it becomes a noun:

I know you're no victim, but men have incredible will.

Words like this—such as “tip” or “fall”—just give you an extra option.

4. Change the order of the end words

An easy way to loosen the sestina is to ignore the rules for where the end-words repeat, and put them wherever you want in each stanza.

I did this in my sestina “Rhetoric,” and Jordan Pérez does it in “Mixed-Up Sestina,” but actually it’s surprising how rarely you do see poets take this route. I suspect the strict order actually makes a more enticing constraint—maybe it adds more feeling of security.

Nonetheless, if you want to change the order in which the words appear, you can.

5. Modify your end words

Even if you follow my tips #1-4, you might still end up scratching your head about how to make a word come back yet again.

And you would not be the first! So poets, and especially poets of today and the last few years, have developed even more ways that you can fiddle with your end-words to make things easier.

Here are some more tactics that you are welcome to adopt:

Use homophones, like “I” and “eye.”
Use words that end with the word you chose. If “less” is one of your end-words, you can use “hopeless” or “doubtless.”
Use synonyms. In “The Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi,” William Meredith switches freely between “prey,” “victims,” and “quarry” for one of his end-words. Safia Elhillo takes this much further in “Transport,” where everyrepetition is actually a synonym, except for the very last ones in the envoi.
Use words that relate to the same topic. In “Instructions from My Father,” one of Himeles’s end-words in stanza 1 is “symphony.” This would be incredibly hard to use 7 times!—though she does manage 3. For the other 4, she uses related words: “rhythm,” “harmony,” “medley,” and “silence”—all words related to music, or in case of silence, the absence of music.
Just do whatever the heck you want. In my sestina “Rhetoric,” one of my end-words was supposedly “pie”—but it only actually appears once! The other six times are “Pi,” “happy,” “crappy,” “apply,” “magpie,” and “harpy.” “Apply” is a bit of a reach, but I say it works, and it’s my poem, so what I say goes!

What this all boils down to is:

Poets stretch the rules as much as they need to make the form work for them—and you can too.

6. Make the envoi do whatever you need!

That stretching applies particularly to the last stanza of the sestina, the envoi.

Being only 3 lines, it is much more difficult to make all 6 end-words appear naturally in the envoi, let alone in the order given in the rules.

So poets tend to feel free to change the envoi however they want. Words appear in any order, and maybe not even 2 per line. Indeed. Jordan Pérez simply misses it out altogether!

Some other sestina tips

Next, here are a few more tools and approaches that I think make sestinas more approachable, and more likely to succeed.

Finding the end words

I guess the most nerve-wracking thing about the sestina is asking, “How do I choose the end words?”

It can seem pretty scary, committing yourself to using exactly those six words, and not others.

However, it really doesn’t have to be that hard. A big secret of the sestina is that no matter what end-words you choose, the magic still seems to happen.

Having said that, there are two ends of the spectrum for deciding your words:

Choose your topic, then write the first stanza, and see what end-words you get
Choose your end-words first, then write the first stanza, and see what topic you get!

And somewhere in the middle is:

Choose your topic, then pick some end-words that seem to relate.

I’ve done all of these, and they can all work. I particularly love choosing the words first and letting the topic emerge—I find that exhilarating, like riding a roller coaster. But I know it’s not for everyone.

In addition, you can always change your choices of end-words. If the first draft of your first stanza throws up “manchineel,” “swordfish,” and “bulwark,” you might want to swap some out for easier words!

Or if after a couple of stanzas one word feels like a drag rather than a lift, replace it.

Choose your level

If you’re beginning your first sestina, I would suggest keeping to the traditional word order, and trying (at least at first) to use the same 6 end-words throughout.

Handling the repetition is probably enough to be thinking about by itself, without also throwing variations into the mix, so I think you’ll find a traditional approach actually easier.

(To help, I’ve made this worksheet, which shows you where to fill in the end-words, once you’ve got them in the first stanza.)

Having said that, if you get stuck, do feel free to use one or more of variations above to free things up.

After that first one, and as you become more practiced and confident, you will probably want to test out more of the variations from the start.

Use a scene

Many, if not most, sestinas are based around some kind of place or event that is pretty specific.

In “Ethel’s Sestina,” Ethel is waiting in the sun with her son. In “Instructions from My Father,” the speaker is having a phone conversation with his daughter. In “Transport,” the speaker is in a taxi driving home. In my “Rhetoric,” two characters are waking up in a bedroom.

I think this happens because if you have a real physical scene to refer to, it keeps the sestina grounded, and helps to stop it circling round and round without purpose!

So before you start, it’s worth taking a moment to plan what place and time you might set your sestina in.

Move the topic on

Another way to stop the sestina from endless gyration is to make sure that you move the subject forward.

In “Instructions from My Father,” Himeles makes each stanza tackle a new sub-topic. In “Ethel’s Sestina,” Smith has one big turn in the fourth stanza, where Ethel starts to see her Savior coming to get her. Then in the rest of the poem she goes willingly to meet him.

However you do it, whether lots of smaller movements or one big turn, do look for ways to make sure your sestina progresses.

A flowing voice can help

The sestina is a longish poem, so it helps if your speaker is good at stringing words together! You might aim for lots of enjambment.

However, also be careful: one of the pitfalls of the sestina is letting the voice take over, and losing the sense of it. Make sure you still keep the meaning driving forward.

Borrowing from the sestina

Lastly, I want to draw back from this form, as fascinating and varied as it is, and say that I think sestinas can also teach you something more general.

The power of the sestina is the repetition of words. You can take the most ordinary spoken language, put it into a sestina, and the repetition can make it poetry all by itself.

And this is a lesson and a tool that you can use in other poems too:

One way to pick up a draft that’s drooping is simply to repeat some of its words.

I used this to create my poem “The Place of Spreading Rock,” and a poet in the Spark workshop this month also felt that the use of repetition gave new energy to an old draft she was having trouble with.

So, I hope you’ll try out the sestina, and see what it gives you.

Next Steps

If you’ve never written a sestina before, try this exercise to make your first one.

Download my Sestina Worksheet, and print it out.
Write these words at the ends of the lines in the first stanza:
Fall
Tale
Love
Slip
Eye
Free.
Fill in those words at the ends of the lines in the next 5 stanzas, following the number pattern on the worksheet to tell you which word goes where.
Think briefly about ways you might use the end-words flexibly. For example:
—“Fall” can be a noun or a verb. And as a noun, it can also mean a season as well as a time that something falls.
—”Tale” and “Eye” have homophones you can use, “tail” and “I.” And “tail” can again be used as both noun and verb!
Decide a topic that you’re going to start with, and also figure out a scene or situation from that topic that you can base the poem around.
For example, you might decide to tell the story of meeting your life partner, and the scene or moment could be who you’re telling this story to, and when you’re telling it.
Optionally, you might plan out some sub-topics, one per stanza. But you can also skip this if you find it too limiting.
WRITE! Let the end-words inspire new ideas as you do so. And be ready to change and adapt as you go—let the form guide you and push you.

Good luck! And if your first one doesn’t catch fire, don’t worry—you’ll still learn useful things for your next one, and your second one will very likely be stronger.