The sestina, a relatively older form, was invented by Arnaut Daniel a member of a group of twelfth century poets known as troubadours. These were basically court poets who would perform for French nobles basically composing the poems and singing to the noblemen. Their poems were always presented with musical accompaniment. Often the troubadours would compete with each other to see who could produce the wittiest, most complex styles of poetry. The sestina was considered extremely complex and was attempted only by the master troubadours.
While the sestina was a popular form used in France, it also gained some popularity among Italian poets of the era including Petrarch and Dante. Oddly enough its greatest popularity in English occurred in the twentieth century, primarily in the United States. Some theorize that the popularity of the form with modern American poets may have to do with the ease the form fits into ordinary conversation. Modern discourse tends to repeat certain words, often to highlight a point other times just to keep it fixed in the conversation.
In English, the sestina is often written in iambic pentameter. This thirty-nine lined poem is broken into six sestets (six lined stanzas) and one triplet (three lined stanza) and is typically written without rhyme. Instead of the rhyme, the last word of each line in stanza one is repeated as the last work in each line of subsequent stanzas, in a particular order. In the final three stanzas, called an envoi, these words are used two to a line, with one falling in the middle of each line and one coming at the end of the line.
For the diagram of the form I will not try to show the meter, instead I will only diagram the end word pattern. The basic scheme is for each subsequent stanza end word to be the same as the previous stanza's in the following pattern 6-1-5-2-4-3, or more graphically represented as follows:
Lines end word
1 A
2 B
3 C
4 D
5 E
6 F
7 F
8 A
9 E
10 B
11 D
12 C
13 C
14 F
15 D
16 A
17 B
18 E
19 E
20 C
21 B
22 F
23 A
24 D
25 D
26 E
27 A
