Sestina Composer

A tool for building a sestina: the classical 39-line form, or its drifting variant where end-words morph one letter at a time.

A brief history of the sestina

The form was invented around 1180 in Occitania by the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel, whose Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra is the earliest surviving sestina. Dante admired Arnaut enough to place him in Purgatorio XXVI and call him il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman.

The form travelled with the Provençal tradition. Dante wrote his own, Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra. Petrarch followed with several in the Canzoniere. It arrived in English centuries later through Sir Philip Sidney’s Ye Goatherd Gods (1593), an unusual double sestina of twelve stanzas rather than six.

The mathematical name for the rotation is retrogradatio cruciata, “crossed retrogradation.” Take any six end-words in stanza one; each subsequent stanza reorders them by reading inward from the outside: line 6, line 1, line 5, line 2, line 4, line 3. After six applications, you return to the original order. The envoi uses all six again, two per line. No word is ever in the same position twice until the form closes on itself.

The sestina mostly slept for centuries in English until the modernists picked it back up: Ezra Pound, Rudyard Kipling (Sestina of the Tramp-Royal, 1896), and later Elizabeth Bishop (her 1965 Sestina), Anthony Hecht, and John Ashbery. Each treated the form differently. Kipling naturalistic, Bishop domestic and elegiac, Ashbery gleefully indifferent to the form’s demands.

Sources

  • Academy of American Poets, Poetic Form: Sestina. poets.org/glossary/sestina
  • Poetry Foundation, Glossary of Poetic Terms: Sestina. poetryfoundation.org
  • Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (revised edition, Random House, 1979), pp. 140–145.
  • Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto XXVI (lines 115–120 for the address to Arnaut).
  • Stephanie Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet (Harvard University Press, 2010), for comparative formal history.
  • Arnaut Daniel, Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra (c. 1180s); modern editions in James J. Wilhelm, The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel (Garland, 1981).

The drifting sestina

River of Reverence by Lucy Holman adds one rule to the classical form. Every end-word must differ from its same-lineage predecessor by exactly one letter. River to riper to rider to rides to tides to times to tames. Six streams of one-letter mutation running vertically through the rotation. The composer calls this mode Drift.

The tool

Two modes

  • Traditional. Enter six end-words into stanza 1. The rotation fills in the remaining 36 positions automatically.
  • Drift. Each of the 42 positions (36 stanza plus 6 envoi) is hand-editable. As you type, letters that differ from the previous stanza’s same-lineage word glow. A warning badge flags any word that drifts more than one letter from its predecessor, or that matches it exactly (no drift at all).

Two views

  • Grid. A compact spreadsheet view of all positions. Fastest for shaping the end-word skeleton.
  • Body. Write the full poem. Each line is its own input. The expected end-word locks to the grid and validates as you type the line. Envoi lines require both the mid-line word and the end-line word, per the form.

Presets

Start from buttons preload:

  • Blank. An empty grid.
  • Holman. The six end-words from Lucy Holman’s River of Reverence, for exploring the drift mechanic directly.
  • Sidney. The six end-words from Ye Goatherd Gods (mountains, valleys, forests, music, evening, morning), the canonical example of classical English sestina vocabulary.

Saving work

Every change autosaves to this browser’s localStorage. Use Save Version to snapshot a named draft that you can return to, fork, or delete. Versions live only in the current browser. No account, no server.

Sharing

Share link copies a URL with the current grid state encoded (?c=...). Anyone opening it sees your draft. Body lines are not URL-shared. Those stay local unless you export.

Copy as text copies a plaintext version for pasting into a writing app.

Coda

The composer is deliberately minimal. It is the skeleton of a sestina, not its voice. It helps you lay the lattice, check your drift, and save drafts. The writing is still yours.