God Breaks The Chains (Sestina Poetry) Poem by Marieta Maglas

Sestina The sestina (less commonly, though more correctly, sextain) is a wondrous strange beast, the brainchild of a twelfth-century Provençal troubador. It doesn't use rhyme; instead, it has six keywords essential to the poem's structure. The poem's 39 lines - six 6-line stanzas followed by a 3-line envoi or tornada - all end with one of the keywords; in the tornada, there are two keywords in each line, one of them at the end and the other somewhere in the middle. Here the six keywords are prize (1) , life (2) , year (3) , paint (4) , talent (5) , art (6) , and they occur in the first six stanzas as follows: stanza 1: 123456 stanza 2: 615243 stanza 3: 364125 stanza 4: 532614 stanza 5: 451362 stanza 6: 246531 This is the prescribed order for a sestina - at least, for an unrhymed one. (Yes, there are rhymed ones too. This is a variation dealt with later.) No deviation from this order is tolerated. However, there are several different possible orders for the keywords in the tornada ('tornada schemes') . The example above uses 12/34/56. Other possibilities found in published sestinas include 14/25/36,25/43/61 and 65/24/31. Pretty well anything goes, really. But since you're going to write the tornada first (see below) , you may as well pick one of the four possibilities given here. You'll notice that each keyword appears once in the first line of a stanza, once in the second line of a stanza, and so on. You may also notice that the permutations of the keywords follow a regular pattern. It's all a bit like bell-ringing. Or mathematical group theory, for that matter. At 39 lines, the sestina is eligible for poetry competitions with a 40-line limit. (Perhaps they used to have a lot of those in Provence.) How to write a sestina First decide on your six keywords. Any old six words will do, but try to make life easier for yourself by making at least some of them common words, or words with several different meanings, or words that occur in well-known phrases. Now write the tornada. (Writing this first should ensure that the poem is going to come to a conclusion that makes sense.) Then decide which keyword is which i.e. what 'tornada scheme' you are following. Now you know the last word of each of the other 36 lines. The rest is just 'wording in'! Variations There is no shortage of of these, both standard (rhymed sestina, double sestina) and non-standard (Newman sestina, quartina, bina) . There is also a related form called the canzone.