General Description and Requirements

The sestina is one of the more difficult forms to master. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is the length of the poem. One might write a few sonnets per day. The sonnet only has 140 syllables when using the English Heroic Line of iambic pentameter. A sestina using the same line is 390 syllables long, almost three times the size. More difficult than the length, though, is the requirement for the use of end words. In a sonnet, such as the English sonnet, one should have fourteen different words that rhyme in pairs, so seven pairs of rhymed words. In the sestina’s thirty-nine lines, there are exactly six words. That is not saying six sets of rhymed words. There are only six words that end the thirty-nine lines.

Whereas rhymed poetry tends to have a rhyming pattern, such as the English sonnet’s ababcdcdefefgg pattern; the sestina instead uses a folding pattern. All stanzas are six lines, and the order of the end words in the first stanza determines the order in subsequent stanzas as such:
Stanza 1: 123456
Stanza 2: 615243
Stanza 3: 364125
Stanza 4: 532614
Stanza 5: 451362
Stanza 6: 246531.