The Sestina

A fixed thirty-nine line form built without rhyme but with rigid word repetition: six stanzas of six lines each, using the same six end words in a fixed rotating order from stanza to stanza, followed by a three-line envoi that uses all six words again, two per line. Invented by the Occitan troubadour Arnaut Daniel in the twelfth century, the form was carried into Italian by Dante and Petrarch and later revived in English by poets including Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop and W. H. Auden, drawn to the way the form's mechanical constraint forces unexpected turns of meaning as the same six words recur in new contexts.