Sestina

A poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy, where the words ending the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a different order at the end of lines in each of the subsequent five stanzas and, two to a line, in the middle and at the end of the three lines in the closing envoy. The patterns of word-repetitions are as follows:

1 2 3 4 5 6
6 1 5 2 4 3
3 6 4 1 2 5
5 3 2 6 1 4
4 5 1 3 6 2
2 4 6 5 3 1
(6 2) (1 4) (5 3)

Examples are Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Complaint of Lisa," and "Sestina", W. H. Auden's "Paysage Moralisé" and Donald Hall's "Hang it all, Ezra Pound, there is only one sestina." Sir Philip Sidney's "You Gote-herd Gods, that love the grassie mountaines" is a double sestina.