sestina
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of sestina
1580–90; < Italian, equivalent to sest ( o ) (< Latin sextus sixth ) + -ina -ine 2
Explanation
A sestina is a strictly patterned poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and a final triplet. It will take you a while to write a sestina for English class — you'd better start writing! The form of a sestina is so complicated it can feel like a math problem to compose one. Sestinas have a total of 39 lines — six six-line stanzas followed by a three-line envoi, or brief stanza. The last word of every line is repeated in a specific pattern, so the six words are rotated through the endings of every single line. The earliest sestinas were composed in the medieval language of Occitan, during the 12th century.
Vocabulary lists containing sestina
Academic and Literary Vocabulary, Unit 2
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Part 3 Literary Terms (Unit 6)
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Although an occasional narrative experiment might disrupt the format, what makes “Law & Order” special is precisely the fact that it has one, like a sonnet, a sestina, or an ottava rima.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 24, 2022
There aren’t strict rules for what is poetry unless you’re trying to adhere to a specific form like the sestina, haiku or limerick.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 9, 2021
The story’s structure resembles that of a sestina, the same elements — Jordan, Seinfeld, aluminum foil, Chore Boy and baking soda — recombining in different configurations throughout to dizzying effect.
From New York Times ● Aug. 10, 2021
At its best, whether in blank verse or in a 39-line sestina, his work was lyrical and bracing.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 11, 2018
The sestina has six six-line stanzas and an envoy: in the stanzas the final words of each line remain the same throughout, though the order is changed.
From Rhymes and Meters A Practical Manual for Versifiers by Winslow, Horatio
Just as sonnets, sestinas, and haiku follow patterns of lines, so do visual compositions.
From Textbooks ● Dec. 21, 2021
McSweeney is much more formally inclined — the book contains a crown of sonnets and two sestinas, perhaps the only good sestinas I’ve ever read.
From New York Times ● Jun. 16, 2020
He takes traditional verse forms — sonnets, sestinas, ballads, pantoums — and retools them, as if they were engine parts, for his own purposes as well.
From New York Times ● Nov. 22, 2016
Merrill was gleefully eclectic: he wrote sonnets and sestinas and haikus and epigrams; he worked in heroic couplets and terza rima and the Rubaiyat stanza.
From Time Magazine Archive
He’s obsessed with forms like sonnets and sestinas.
From "Watch Us Rise" by Renée Watson and Ellen Hagan
Such, for instance, is the chanson d'amour, a form less artfully regulated indeed than the corresponding canzon or sestine of the troubadours, but still of some intricacy.
From A Short History of French Literature by Saintsbury, George
Barnabe Barnes’s Odes Pastoral sestine 2: ‘But women will have their own wills, Alas, why then should I complain?’
From A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles by Lee, Sidney, Sir
The canzoni, the sestine, all the lyric metres of Italy and Spain were borrowed from his treasury.
From View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, Vol. 3 by Hallam, Henry
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
