The verse form that we call 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 introduction of the form into English literature dates from the 16th century. George Puttenham (a member of my mother’s ancient family, the Putnams of Salem Village) was the putative author of the first book of prosody written in English, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1588) in which the form is described thus:
"There is another sort of proportion used by Petrarch called the setzino, not rhyming as other songs do, but by choosing six words out of which all the whole ditty is made, every [one] of those six commencing and ending his verse by course, which restraint, to make the ditty sensible, will try the maker’s cunning."
This is how I describe the sestina in the current Fourth Edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, (Hanover, NH, and London, 2012):
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.
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.
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.
Edmund Spenser was apparently the first English poet to use a form of the sestina in his Shepherd’s Calendar which appeared in 1579. Here is my modernized version of the first two stanzas of lines 151-189 of the Eclogue for the month of August:
YOU WASTEFUL WOODS
|
You wasteful woods bear witness of my woe |
|
Where my complaints did oftentimes resound; |
|
You careless birds are privy to my cries, |
|
Which in your songs were wont to make a part; |
|
You, pleasant spring, have lulled me oft to sleep, |
|
Whose streams my trickling tears did oft augment. |
|
|
|
Resort of people does my grief augment, |
|
The walled-round towns do work my greater woe; |
|
The forest wide is fitter to resound |
|
The hollow echo of my care-filled cries: |
|
I hate the house from whence my love did part -- |
|
Her wailful absence bars my eyes from sleep. |
Note that the teleutons of stanza one are not used in standard order in the second stanza; rather, the last word of the last line of the first stanza reappears as the first line of the second stanza, and the following teleutons remain in their original order. This is the pattern that is followed in the next four stanzas:
|
Let streams of tears supply the place of sleep, |
|
Let all that’s sweet be void; that may augment |
|
My dole, draw near! What’s best to wail my woe |
|
Are the wild woods, my sorrows to resound, Than bed or bower, both which I fill with cries When I see them so waste, and find no part
Of pleasure past. Here will I dwell apart In ghastly grove therefore, till my last sleep Does close mine eyes: so shall I not augment, With sight of such a change, my restless woe. Help me, ye baneful birds, whose shrieking sound Is sign of dreary death, my deadly cries |
Most ruthfully to tune. And as my cries
(Which of my woe cannot reveal least part)
You hear all night, when nature must crave sleep,
Increase, so let your irksome howls augment.
Thus all the night in plaints, the day in woe
I have vowed to waste, till safe and sound
She come back home, whose voice’s silver sound
To cheerful songs can change my cheerless cries.
Hence, with the nightingale will I take part,
That blessed bird that spends her time of sleep
In songs and plaintive pleas, to more augment
The memory of misdeed, that bred her woe.
And you that feel no woe, when as the sound
Of these my nightly cries you hear apart,
Let break your sounder sleep, pity augment.
