The sestina is of Medieval French origin, attributed to Arnaut Daniel in the late 12th century and used by other Gallic poets and by Italians including Petrarch and Dante (from whom it received its Italian name). The popularity of the poem in English is primarily a 20th century phenomenon, however, particularly in the United States. The six end-words or teleutons of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a specific order as end-words in the five succeeding sestet stanzas. In English the sestina is generally written in iambic pentameter or, sometimes, in decasyllabic meters. Its thirty-nine lines are divided into six sestet stanzas and a final triplet envoy (or envoi). In the envoy the six teleutons are also picked up, one of them being buried in, and one finishing each line.
An “envoy” is a cauda, a partial stanza used as a tail or coda at the end of a poem that originally sent the poem on its way to the person to whom the poem was addressed: “Go, little poem, speed on your way to my beloved.” This ancient function has slipped into disuse over the centuries, but the coda has remained as a climactic shorter stanza that ends a poem or song. Because it was originally merely an addition of this sort, any poem might have had an envoy, but most poems did not, and envoys are optional even in the sestina.
The order in which the end-words are repeated appears to have its roots in numerology, but what the significance of the pattern was originally is now unknown. The sequence of numbers is 6-1-5-2-4-3. Obviously, the series is just 1-2-3-4-5-6 with the last three numbers reversed and inserted ahead of the first three: 6-1-5-2-4-3. If the end-words of stanza one are designated ABCDEF (the capital letters signifying repetitions) and the sequence 615243 is applied to it, the order of repetitions in the second stanza will be FAEBDC. Apply the sequence to the second stanza, and the third stanza will be CFDABE. Continuing the process will give us ECBFAD in the fourth stanza, DEACFB in the fifth, and BDFECA in the sixth sestet. The order of repetition in the three lines of the envoy is BE / DC / FA.
The oldest British example — a double sestina, actually — is by Sir Philip Sidney, "You Goat-Herd Gods" from his 16th century Arcadia; the version given here has had its spelling modernized. It is not merely a double sestina (twelve sestet stanzas rather than six), but a pastoral dialogue or eclogue as well:
YOU GOAT-HERD GODS
A Dialogue between Strephon and Klaius
Strephon. You goat-herd Gods who love the grassy mountains,
You nymphs that haunt the springs in pleasant valleys,
You satyrs joyed with free and quiet forests,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music
Which to my woes gives still an early morning
And draws the dolor on till weary evening.
Klaius. O Mercury, foregoer to the evening,
O heavenly huntress of the savage mountains.
O lovely star, entitled of the morning,
Which that my voice does fill these woeful valleys,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music
Which oft hath Echo tired in secret forests.
Strephon. I that was once free-burgess of the forests,
Where shade from sun and sports I sought at evening;
I that was once esteemed for pleasant music
Am banished now among the monstrous mountains
Of huge despair, and foul affliction's valleys,
Am grown a screech-owl to my self each morning.
Klaius. I that was once delighted every morning,
Hunting the wild inhabitants of forests,
I that was once the music of these valleys,
So darkened am, that all my day is evening,
Heart-broken so, that mole-hills seem high mountains
.and fill the vales with cries instead of music.
Strephon. Long since, alas, my deadly, swinish music
Hath made itself a crier of the morning
And has with wailing strength climbed highest mountains:
Long since my thoughts more desert be than forests;
Long since I see my joys come to their evening
And state thrown down to over-trodden valleys.
Klaius. Long since the happy dwellers of these valleys
Have prayed me leave my strange, exclaiming music
Which troubles their day's work, and joys of evening.
Long since I hate the night, more hate the morning;
Long since my thoughts chase me like beasts in forests,
And make me wish myself laid under mountains.
Strephon. Me seems I see the high and stately mountains
Transform themselves to low, dejected valleys;
Me seems I hear in these ill-changed forests,
The nightingales do learn of owls their music;
Me seems I feel the comfort of the morning
Turned to the mortal serene of an evening.
Klaius. Me seems I see a filthy, cloudy evening
As soon as sun begins to climb the mountains;
Me seems I feel a noisome scent, the morning
When I do smell the flowers of these valleys;
Me seems I hear, when I do hear sweet music,
The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.
Strephon. I wish to fire the trees of all these forests;
I give the sun a last farewell each evening;
I curse the fiddling finders-out of music:
With envy I do hate the lofty mountains
And with despite despise the humble valleys;
I do detest night, evening, day, and morning.
Klaius. Curse to myself my prayer is, the morning:
My fire is more than can be made with forests;
My state more base than are the basest valleys;
I wish no evenings more to see, each evening;
Shamed I have my self in sight of mountains
And stopped my ears, lest I grow mad with music.
Strephon.
For she whose parts maintained a perfect music,
Whose beauty shone more than the blushing morning,
Who much surpassed in state the stately mountains,
In straightness passed the cedars of the forests,
Has cast me, wretched, into eternal evening
By taking her two suns from these dark valleys.
Klaius.
For she, to whom compared, the Alps are valleys,
She, whose least word brings from the spheres their music,
At whose approach the sun rose in the evening,
Who, where she went, bore in her forehead morning,
Is gone, is gone from these our spoiled forests,
Turning to deserts our best pastured mountains.
Strephon, Klaius. These mountains witness all, so shall these valleys,
These forests too, made wretched by our music:
Our morning hymn is this, and song at evening.
— Sir Philip Sidney (modern version by Wesli Court)
Here is a twenty-first century double sestina written by “Wesli Court,” the pen-name under which Lewis Turco generally writes his traditionally formal poems:
DOUBLE VISION1
A Double Sestina
I.
It came upon me while I was on the crapper
of my father’s parsonage, my eyes
boring into the porcelain of the tiles
before me on the wall. The tiles were white.
They spread across the vacancy of time
That seeped into my mind and filled that blank
jug of puberty with a vast Mont Blanc
of sorrow and ennui. On that crapper
I saw that I would have to fill up time
with something more than the nothing that met my eyes,
the emptiness that seeped out of those white
ranges of porcelain whose trackless tiles
led finally to death. I feared those tiles
worse than I feared my death, that ultimate blank-
ness waiting for me on the snowy white
crest of age. I saw life was a crapper
that had to be filled with something. If I closed my eyes
perhaps I could dream myself to a better time
than this one snowing before me. There was no time
to dream. What could I do? I could fill tiles
with words. I could write. I filled my eyes
with reading every day; I could fill blank
sheets with my own words. I rose off that crapper
thinking I might pave my way with white
sheaves laden with stories, poems — I could write
my way to death by filling my living tome
with endless lines of type till I came-a-cropper
at last and alas! perhaps, on the devil’s tines,
if I kept my gaze steady and didn’t blink,
and if I did not try to romanticize
my life with gods and demons, with the sighs
of wishful thinking, with the little white
lies of religion that covered up the blank
of existence with the stuff that fills a crapper.
I pulled myself out of the abyss of tiles
Ready to take on life and move in time.
I’d use my eyes to read. Perhaps in time
I’d use those words to write, to fill up tiles
With something more than blankness on that crapper.
II.
So that is what I’ve done. I’ve been the croupier
in life’s casino to this point, with ice
in my arteries. My column of tales
and songs has risen to a decent height
and I am old at last, although not tame
as maybe I should be. But I won’t blink
at this point, for why should I wish to blink?
I’ve been raking in what a good croupier
rakes in — coin of the realm like leaves of thyme,
minutes and moments that one can use to spice
the pot of emptiness when it gains heat
enough to flavor these mortal tales
that I’ve been cooking up. There’s nothing stales
a blend of blandishments quick as a blink
faster than losing interest at its height
even as one’s flesh grows crepier
with every year and hour. So, throw some ice
into the mix, perhaps, but never tame
the cold gazpacho one swallows nigh the tomb.
Trade the rake for a ladle, but keep those tales
swirling about in that bucket of mordant ice
and, before your readers can even blink,
serve it like a waiter, not a croupier,
when the flavor has hit its tasteful height.
Some folk feel that life is just a hoot,
a game of chance played with a friendly team
and not alone with “God” as one’s croupier
dressed in cummerbund and a set of tails
spinning the wheel. Before you can even blink,
the game is done and you are soused with ice
dumped on you by the “team.” You make your choice,
and if you manage to gain a little height
you place your bet, the wheel whirrs — if you blink
(or even if you don’t) the suave croupier
pushes over your pile of songs and tales
and you find out there is no game or team,
there’s only ice that chills you till you’re tame
and lowered by that croupier from about man’s height —
he doesn’t blink and he will tell no tales.
— Wesli Court
In the 19th century Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote another double sestina titled "The Complaint of Lisa"; his "Sestina," which Swinburne made to rhyme ababab as well, turned its stanzas into Sicilian sestets and increased the difficulty of the form, but some of the earliest French and Italian sestinas also rhymed, so this was not really an experiment:
SESTINA
I saw my soul at rest upon a day
As a bird sleeping in the nest of night,
Among soft leaves that give the starlight way
To touch its wings but not its eyes with light;
So that it knew as one in visions may,
And knew not as men waking. of delight.
This was the measure of my soul's delight;
It had no power of joy to fly by day,
Nor part in the large lordship of the light;
But in a secret moon-beholden way
Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night.
And all the love and life that sleepers may.
But such life's triumph as men waking may
It might not have to feed its faint delight
Between the stars by night and sun by day,
Shut up with green leaves and a little light;
Because its way was as a lost star's way,
A world's not wholly known of day or night.
All loves and dreams and sounds and gleams of night
Made it all music that such minstrels may,
And all they had they gave it of delight;
But in the full face of the fire of day
What place shall be for any starry light,
What part of heaven in all the wide sun's way?
Yet the soul woke not, sleeping by the way,
Watched as a nursling of the large eyed night,
And sought no strength nor knowledge of the day,
Nor closer touch conclusive of delight,
Nor mightier joy nor truer than dreamers may,
Nor more of song than they, nor more of light.
For who sleeps once and sees the secret light
Whereby sleep shows the soul a fairer way
Between the rise and rest of day and night,
Shall care no more to fare as all men may,
But be his place of pain or of delight,
There shall he dwell, beholding night as day.
Song, have thy day and take thy fill of light
Before the night be fallen across thy way;
Sing while he may, man hath no long delight.
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
Edmund Gosse, a contemporary of Swinburne, also wrote a "Sestina," and, as sometimes was the fashion, he italicized the teleutons. Not long after the turn of the 20th century Ezra Pound returned to the dramatic mode of Sidney and wrote the monologue "Sestina: Altaforte"; this, together with his "Sestina for Isolt," set off a steady trickle, if not a flood, of traditional and experimental sestinas.
The problem with the sestina is, generally, that the repeated end-words can be obtrusive. To draw the reader's attention away from the repetitions, poets often enjamb their lines so that sentences and phrases are not end-stopped on the teleutons, or they may use, on occasion, homographs of the end-words, like wind (as in "south wind") and wind (as in "wind your own clock"), or even such ploys as can and toucan:
THE FOREST OF MY SEASONS2
Desire today is a cavern of snow;
ice rimes all limbs with synonyms for wind.
Yesternoon it was goat-time, time for horns
rampant on a field vert under the woods
quartered in a southern compass. Toucan
tones rose close beneath the surface of shade,
threatening rupture. Poet, draw your shade
today upon a mirror made of snow
shadowed. Men may hibernate if bears can.
Desire must sleep in a cavern of wind
till it may be harried awake by wood-
pecker beak and Pan's sunsharp or ramshorns —
Too many words, like girdles built of horn,
confined in an attic. How to say shade
but make it mean more, as: tiles of the wood
laid for light to walk on; and to have snow
imply more than God's linoleum. Wind
is wind, but direction matters. Who can
help me? Where's my muse today? Shake your can,
you errant Echo, and get home. My horns
sprout long as the cuckoo's song while you wind
your own clock and make love with your own
shade
someplace up a cavern or down the snow
where wild Narcissus buds among your woods.
The forest of my seasons grows strange woods
sometimes; this fall of words grows as it can,
not as it ought. My pen is cold as snow:
its ink runs like chilled honey from the horns
of silence. Lie you down, lie down in shade,
word-warbler. Sleep sound with your mistress wind.
And while you sleep, dream. Dream of the south wind
needling you awake with slivers of woods:
birch and pine, maple that sweetens in shade;
oak on the white hillside. Dream, if you can,
of gray moles, brown mice, winter's hunting horns
blown to silence. Dream no longer of snow,
for time and flesh shall do more than wind can
to blend your words with woodwinds and woodshorns.
There will be tonics. It's time for shades now.
— Lewis Turco
However, in his "Age and Indifferent Clouds" Harry Mathews deliberately used such words as "hippopotamus" and "bronchitis," thus drawing the reader's attention to the teleutons rather than away from them, and the beginnings of the lines doubled the difficulty by making puns and ringing variations on six herbs and plants, which might go unnoticed because the end-words take so much of the reader's attention. Here is a Court sestina from Gathering that does similar things:
THE DAY WE BOMBED THE MOON (AND BARACK OBAMA WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE), A SESTINA
October ninth, 2009, we sent
A rocket off to Luna. We meant to bomb her
Into submission? No, our good intent:
To blow up surface dust to test for ice.
On the same day the Nobel Prize Committee
Amazed the world by bestowing its amity
Award upon a tyro. A calamity,
It seemed to some — an evil precedent
Imposed upon America by committee.
They gave the Peace Prize to Barack Obama!
Many Republicans needed to ask for ice-
Water and Schnapps, or even an oxygen tent.
No one had dreamed an explosion of this extent
Could blow moondust in the face of amity
Around the House and Senate. It wasn’t nice
That those Norse should cause old pols to resent
Explosive love. It was a suicide bomber
NASA sent to ruin comity —
If not around the world, the R. N. C.
At the very least. Gaddafi in his tent
Celebrated Luna’s death. “Embalm her!”
Was his battle cry, his enmity
For global infidelity was sent
To Cocoa, Florida, well-packed in ice.
But NASA said, “It isn’t very nice
To imply we had an impact on the Committee
Rather than the moon! Our bomb was sent
Out into space. We’re not incompetent!”
Meanwhile, a wave of pure tsunamity
Engulfed the Oval Office, and Obama,
Although surprised himself, felt like the balm or
Salve of sweet salvation in a trice
Had rehabilitated amity,
Restored a modicum of comity
To the world at large to some extent,
One could sense the very aloe’s scent.
Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee,
And malcontents hope NASA finds its ice,
But what price amity amid dissent?
Donald Justice's "Sestina: Here in Katmandu" has no envoy and its line-lengths vary, generally between four stresses and one:
SESTINA: HERE IN KATMANDU
We have climbed the mountain.
There's nothing more to do.
It is terrible to come down
To the valley
Where, amidst many flowers,
One thinks of snow,
As formerly, amidst snow,
Climbing the mountain,
One thought of flowers,
Tremulous, ruddy with dew,
In the valley.
One caught their scent coming down.
It is difficult to adjust, once down,
To the absense of snow.
Clear days, from the valley,
One looks up at the mountain.
What else is there to do?
Prayer wheels, flowers!
Let the flowers
Fade, the prayer wheels run down.
What have they to do
With us who have stood atop the snow
Atop the mountain,
Flags seen from the valley?
It might be possible to live in the valley,
To bury oneself among flowers,
If one could forget the mountain,
How, never once looking down,
Stiff, blinded with snow,
One knew what to do.
Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,
Especially when to the valley
That wind which means snow
Elsewhere, but here means flowers,
Comes down,
As soon it must, from the mountain.
— Donald Justice
It was Donald Justice who in the late 1950’s introduced the sestina to graduate students in his Poetlry Workshop at the University of Iowa through the example of Weldon Kees’ strange work,
AFTER THE TRIAL
Hearing the judges' well-considered sentence,
The prisoner saw long plateaus of guilt,
And thought of all the dismal furnished rooms
The past assembled, the eyes of parents
Staring through walls as though forever
To condemn and wound his innocence.
And if I raise my voice, protest my innocence,
The judges won't revoke their sentence.
I could stand screaming in this box forever,
Leaving them deaf to everything but guilt;
All the machinery of law devised by parents
Could not be stopped though fire swept the rooms.
Whenever my thoughts move to all those rooms
I sat alone in, capable of innocence,
I know now I was not alone, that parents
Always were there to speak the hideous sentence:
"You are our son; be good; we know your guilt;
We stare through walls and see your thoughts forever."
Sometimes I wished to go away forever;
I dreamt of strangers and of stranger rooms
Where every corner held the light of guilt.
Why do the judges stare? I saw no innocence
In them when they pronounced the sentence;
I heard instead the believing voice of parents.
I can remember evenings when my parents,
Settling my future happily forever,
Would frown before they spoke the sentence:
"Someday the time will come to leave these rooms
Where, under our watchful eyes, you have been innocent;
Remember us before you seize the world of guilt."
Their eyes burn. How can I deny my guilt
When I am guilty in the sight of parents?
I cannot think that even they were innocent.
At least I shall not have to wait forever
To be escorted to the silent rooms
Where darkness promises a final sentence.
We walk forever to the doors of guilt,
Pursued by our own sentences and eyes of parents,
Never to enter innocent and quiet rooms.
— Weldon Kees
Alan Ansen's "A Fit of Something Against Something" is a “diminishing sestina" which starts out normally but then begins to lose words until in the envoy all that's left are the teleutons of each line. Here is a twenty-first century sestina that uses as all its teleutons the word “sestina” itself, thus violating the “rule” regarding the use of six different teleutons:
SESTINA
It drives you crazy to write a sestina.
First off, in order to write a sestina
you need six end-words that don’t shout, “Sestina!”
One should hide the fact that it’s a sestina
you’re writing. I mean, why holler “Sestina!”
if you don’t have to? Why give the sestina
game away right away? For a sestina
needs to be a subtle thing. A sestina
should lead readers away from the sestina,
make them think, “This is no kind of sestina,
it’s a sixteener, maybe, no sestina
sustaining itself on sestets. Sestina
indeed! I don’t believe it. A sestina
doesn’t announce itself, “I’m a sestina,
no less! I live on end-words, a sestina
to end sestinas! I’m a sustainer
of sounds, echoes of a choral Sistiner
bouncing off Michaelangelo sixteen or
so ways from Rome to Nome.” A fine sestina
that would be. Thirty-nine lines of sestina
mumbling into the reader’s ear, “Sestina,
sestina, sestina.” Who could sustain a
poem like that for so long? A sestina
ought perhaps to read more like a sonetto
rispetto than like what it is. Sestina
end-words are teleutons, and a sestina
should tell you tons about what a sestina
is all about. Certainly, a sestina
is about disguise, subtlety, sestina
reticence, reluctance to be sestina-
like. Rather, it ought to be a soul-stainer,
nuanced, a mind-mellower. A sestina
ought not to be the thing, just the sustainer
of thingness in the memory. Sestina
is teleutonals, not end-words. Sestina
is an earful of sense, not a sestina
ending in a coda that says sestina,
repeating end-words, sestina, sestina,
sestina, and a final time, sestina!
— Wesli Court
In 1979 Wesli Court took advantage of the obsessive quality of the sestina's repetitions in "The Obsession," one of the poems in a sequence titled “Letters to the Dead” which rings the changes on the rhymed iambic pentameter sestet. The first line of "The Obsession" contains all six of the end-words, and the same basic line is repeated incrementally as the first line of succeeding stanzas. Each time the line is repeated the syntax is transposed by hypallage; nonetheless, the line always makes sense. Because all six end-words do appear in this line, a particular problem arises at the envoy, for it cannot be of three lines. Instead, the refrain line reappears a seventh time as a one-line envoy rather than as the normal triplet, but with the sense of the original first line reversed:
THE OBSESSION1
Last night I dreamed my father died again,
A decade and a year after he dreamed
Of death himself, pitched forward into night.
His world of waking flickered out and died —
An image on a screen. He is the father
Now of fitful dreams that last and last.
I dreamed again my father died at last.
He stood before me in his flesh again.
I greeted him. I said, "How are you, father?"
But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed
We were together, older than when he'd died —
I saw upon his face the look of night.
I dreamed my father died again last night.
He stood before a mirror. He looked his last
Into the glass and kissed it. He saw he'd died.
I put my arms about him once again
To help support him as he fell. I dreamed
I held the final heartburst of my father.
I died again last night: I dreamed my father
Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight
In doing so. But what was it I dreamed
In fact? An injury that seems to last
Without abatement, opening again
And yet again in dream? Who was it died
Again last night? I dreamed my father died,
But it was not he — it was not my father,
Only an image flickering again
Upon the screen of dream out of the night.
How long can this cold image of him last?
Whose is it, his or mine? Who dreams he dreamed?
My father died. Again last night I dreamed
I felt his struggling heart still as he died
Beneath my failing hands. And when at last
He weighed me down, then I laid down my father,
Covered him with silence and with night.
I could not bear it should he come again —
I died again last night, my father dreamed.
— Wesli Court
Here is a Court sestina, “Tsunami,” from Gathering that incorporates the rhetorical device called hypallage (defined above) to mimic the effect of the wave:
TSUNAMI
The world was washed away by a wall of water
That first became the horizon: a rising wall
That pulled the shallows outward and away
From the shores. The coastal sealife washed
Out to sea with the boats. For a moment there was
Stillness everywhere, and then the world
Listened to a roar that became the world,
The sound of a thousand thunders, not of water
Merely, but of the fluid earth. It was
Then that liquid turned to stone, a wall
Hard as rock screaming that before it washed
Ashore and tore the rose child away
From the whipped, lifted the torsos, mother him away
From the ocean he worked. The place became the world,
Crushed the beaches along the buildings, washed
Limbs and father into the trees. The gristmill water
Filled the wells with salt and gristmill. A wall
Of bricks became a blood grinding what was
Paste behind it into a lying. It was
Mud and plants and trees spun away
Into a nothing of single eddies now all
Things, backwashes and polluted and whirled
In items of undifferentiated water
Where everything maelstrom could be washed.
What could float, buried, what could be washed
Away was unsafe away, out to sea, was
Washed in a tree that held, held above water
Or drowned or floated in mud or floated away
Into who knew where? It was a world
That was caught ashore, but at sea the wall
Did not exist. It was safe above the wall,
On the surface of the wave that rose and washed
Away the earthen world, the solid world,
The world where creatures breathed an air that was
Lighter than liquid. It sent them far away
From breath, from sight, from the living world.
Instead, it gave them a whelming wall that was
Scoured into the minds of those not washed away
From the world of earth into the world of water.
In similar fashion, this sestina from The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court3 uses the rhetorical device of merismus which expands upon a subject by particularizing each element of it:
SESTINA IN INDIAN SUMMER
"Everything is good in its season."
After the frost summer returns and settles
Into the orchard. The sluggish yellowjacket
Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,
And the leaves begin to color our landscapes
The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.
This is no time for us to think of winter
And its white song, no time to sing of winter,
Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,
Running along the backlog turning ocher
And crimson. The chestnut falls from its jacket
Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.
We listen in the night to hear the wind fall
And wonder when it will rise again to fall,
To take the leaves and pile them into winter
Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.
It is enough for now that the wind settles
Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket
Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or
Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,
Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.
Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket
Along the brook, and we will not now inter
Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles
Among the rushes. The warmth of the land escapes
Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes
And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker
Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles
Into the sand. We wait and ignore the fall
Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter
Impending. We hear the late yellowjacket
Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket
Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,
Knowing that the allcolor of our winter
Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.
This renaissance of summer is but windfall.
Soon we will hunker down upon our settles
In sweater and jacket. Backlogs of oak or
Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes
To the winter weather that falls and settles.
Finally, here is another sestina without an envoi, “The Dead Letter Office,” part of the “Letters to the Dead” series in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems. It is a rhyming sestina without an envoi. The italics in which it is printed indicate narrative rather than epistolary monologue as in “The Obsession” which is part of the same series and is not italicized. It begins with an envelope sestet that rhymes abccba rather than ababab, but of course unlike Swinburne’s Sicilian sestets this rhyme scheme changes as the stanzas proceed, although the rhyme words stay the same:
THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE1
Our Hero has been writing to the dead
Because they have been coming to his room
During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.
They never speak, however, and it seems
That if he hopes to send them back to Doom
He must write missives which must then be read.
But how can he be sure they will be read?
He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,
Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.
But have they been delivered, or is there room
For a sure and certain doubt? He sighs. It seems
There's nothing for it but to resort to dreams.
He goes to bed and enters into dreams.
He stands before a building made of red
Incendiary brick lost in the seams
Of cobbled streets. Office of the Dead
Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum
And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom
Had cracked upon these boards. "Is this the doom
Of writing, then?" Our Hero asks, "of dreams?"
For he has forced the door, stands in a room
Hollow as any novel he has read,
Empty as any poem, and as dead.
There are no letters here, or so it seems
At first — but then an envelope that seems
To have been spared for solitary doom
Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;
It is addressed to him. Our Hero dreams
He opens it and reads. What he has read
He understands...but only in that room.
When he awakens in his own bedroom,
He cannot think of what it was he seems
To have understood in the epistle that he read
There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom
Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams
Echoing in the Office of the Dead.
— Wesli Court
Suggested Writing Exercise:
Choose six words to use as teleutons and write a sestina with metrical lines, rhymed or unrhymed, with or without an envoy.
________
1From The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010.
2From Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007.
3 The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004.
This entire essay is an expansion of the section on the sestina to be found in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback, a companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible," copyright © and all rights reserved 2012 by Lewis Turco.
