Sestina...?

Question:how does the sestina format look?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: how does the sestina format look?

Form.
In a traditional Sestina:

The lines are grouped into six sestets and a concluding tercet. Thus a Sestina has 39 lines.

Lines may be of any length. Their length is usually consistent in a single poem.

The six words that end each of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a different order at the end of lines in each of the subsequent five stanzas. The particular pattern is given below. (This kind of recurrent pattern is "lexical repetition".)

The repeated words are unrhymed.

The first line of each sestet after the first ends with the same word as the one that ended the last line of the sestet before it.

In the closing tercet, each of the six words are used, with one in the middle of each line and one at the end.

The pattern of word-repetition is as follows, where the words that end the lines of the first sestet are represented by the numbers "1 2 3 4 5 6":

Using numbers to represent each last word of a line, here is the pattern:

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
2,3,6,5,3,1
5,3,1.
Here's an example: If the first stanza's lines end in: trout, sun, pants, mud, blue, love, then the second stanza's lines would end in: love, trout, blue, sun, mud, pants. One way to have fun with
this form is to use words like "love" and "pants" because they can be both nouns (things) and verbs (actions). One line might say, "Nature is what I love" or another "the old woman climbs and pants".

Does this help? There are a lot of sites on the net which explain some of these oddities . Oddities perhaps but many poets used this form of highly stuctured writing.

Huh? Confused!