fandomhigh | Creative Writing: Poetry, Lesson Five

Wednesday, November 30, 7:00PM FST

[Professor Chaucer is sitting behind his desk with his feet up. On a table to the side of the classroom are a large coffee pot and a plate of cookies.]

Since several people were nice enough yesterday to bring me coffee to my office hours, I've decided to share the love with all of you. Help yourself to coffee and cookies -- don't worry, I didn't bake them myself.

[Lecture] Today we'll be covering a form of poetry called sestina. The sestina is a highly structured form of poetry, perhaps the most complicated of all medieval styles, dating back to the 12th century. A French form, the sestina was syllabic originally but is often adapted to accentual-syllabic lines in English verse. It consists of 39 lines
divided into 6 sestets and one triplet, called the envoi. It is normally unrhymed--instead, the six end-words of the first stanza are picked up and reused as the end-words of the following stanzas in a specific order. In the envoi, one end-word is buried in each line, and one is at the end of each line. Lines can be of any single length.

Each stanza repeats the end-words in the order 615243. The easiest way to describe the repetition is through a list; the actual reason or meaning of the repetition has been lost. The end words repeat as follows (numbers are the lines of the poem, and capital letters stand for the six end-words).

ABCDEF

FAEBDC

CFDABE

ECBFAD

DEACFB

BDFECA

(envoi)
B E
D C
F A

An example of the way in which a sestina's end-words shift can be found
in the first two stanzas of a sestina by Dante Alighieri.

I have come, alas, to the great circle of shadow,
to the short day and to the whitening hills,
when the colour is all lost from the grass,
though my desire will not lose its green,
so rooted is it in this hardest stone,
that speaks and feels as though it were a woman.

And likewise this heaven-born woman
stays frozen, like the snow in shadow,
and is unmoved, or moved like a stone,
by the sweet season that warms all the hills,
and makes them alter from pure white to green,
so as to clothe them with the flowers and grass.

The 12th century Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel is credited with having invented the sestina form. The oldest British example of the form is a double sestina, "You Goat-Herd Gods," written by Philip Sidney. Writers such as Dante, A. C. Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bishop are all noted for having written sestinas of some fame.

Your end of term assignment is to write your own sestina. Assignments are due before December 18, and may be handed in either in class or at my office hours.

[Discussion] I'm going to give you some time today to begin work on your original sestinas. Also, since we have just a couple of classes left, I'd like to know if there's anything you would like to cover before the end of term. Next week we'll discuss your reading assignment from last class.

The following students have more than one unexcused absence. I allow one unexcused, any more will have to submit makeup work. Please see me during class or at my office hours to discuss. Also, a note to all students: please remember that if you don't participate in class discussions, you will only get partial credit for attending.

scissors___

death_n_binky

Creative Writing: Poetry, Lesson Five

Re: LECTURE