Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" is not merely an instance of the sestina form; it is one of the best-known instances of it in English-language poetry. The sestina is a French poetic structure, made up of seven stanzas. The first six of these stanzas contain six lines each, while the seventh (the envoi) contains three. The concluding words from each line of the first stanza are repeated as concluding words in the following stanzas, according to a complex ordering system. The invention of the form is attributed to the French bard Arnaut Daniel, but it was popular among Italian writers, such as Dante, as well. The form has waxed and waned in popularity since its invention, with revitalizations in the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century, and then among modernist writers in the twentieth. Below, we'll discuss several twentieth- and twenty-first-century examples of the form, examining how different poets have used the sestina to achieve their ends.
In part of "The Dry Salvages," which is itself a poem within T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Eliot dips into a highly modified version of the sestina form. The poem describes human beings floating in the ocean. It discusses ways that humanity can escape the endless, directionless floating the poem describes, grappling with themes of death, fate, eternity, and God. The movement in question—that is, the one written in the sestina form—focuses primarily on the misery of this endless floating and on the grief of women on the shore, waiting for the return of the men at sea. Arguably, the repetition of the sestina helps mimic both the literal repetitiveness of the ocean setting and the metaphorical inescapability of human fate. Eliot's sestina, however, differs from a traditional one in several essential ways. Rather than repeating the concluding words of the sestina's first stanza, Eliot opts instead to use words that rhyme with those concluding words—for instance, "wailing," "trailing," and "failing." Furthermore, he includes six sestets, but not the final envoi. And, finally, Eliot does not reorder concluding words between stanzas, instead keeping their order constant from one sestet to the next.
Raych Jackson's "A sestina for a black girl who does not know how to braid hair" uses the repetitions of the sestina for several purposes. Its interwoven end-words suggest the literally interweaving, repetitive process of braiding. Meanwhile, the constant restating and recontextualization of end words in the sestina allow Jackson to examine braiding from multiple angles, presenting it as both a joyful communal act and as a symbol of objectification and intracommunal hierarchy. The work describes a young black girl who cannot braid hair, though others regularly braid hers. Thus she experiences braiding from these two perspectives, as an act of intimacy and as the subject of her own exclusion and humiliation. As Jackson herself has noted, the sestina form also showcases the speaker's increasing sense of self-worth as she works through her own feelings about braiding. Says Jackson, “As I’m first starting off the poem, I’m talking about what I can’t do, what I can’t provide, a skill I don’t possess. It’s not until I realize, during the poem, that [I am] finally useful, is when talking about everyone putting their hands in my head. I do not possess the skill to properly or to intensely braid hair, but I can provide you a head to practice on.”
Finally, the poet John Ashbery is known for his blending of high and low culture, with allusions to pop-cultural topics often considered unsuitable for serious literature mixed with more traditional and lofty topics. The poem "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" exemplifies this distinctive tendency, employing the sestina form to narrate a dreamlike tale involving characters from the cartoon and comic strip Popeye the Sailor. In this work, a number of familiar Popeye characters—Sea Hag, Wimpy, Olive Oyl, and Popeye himself—weigh and discuss their relationships with one another, in ways that feel both entirely free-flowing and nonsensical and yet bounded by the strictures of the sestina form. Thus Ashbery uses the sestina to mimic the comic or cartoon, recycling familiar characters and tropes endlessly, until they feel both thoroughly familiar and entirely meaningless. Joseph Mark Conte, in a discussion of this specific sestina, attributes this quality of the work to "The formal closure and semantic openness of the sestina," calling them "a function of its rather unique combination of a paradigmatic closed form and a metonymic mode of language."
