ESC: English Studies in Canada

ATTRACTIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY SESTINA NEIL Q U E R E N G E SSE R Concordia College A. traditional poetic form dating from the twelfth century, and out of lit­ erary fashion from about the Renaissance to the Victorian era, the sestina has become popular once again, particularly in the last few decades. Paul Cummins’s examination of the sestina’s use in the twentieth century and Marianne Shapiro’s book connecting the modern sestina to its Petrarchan predecessor support Miller Williams’s assertion that “probably no other [tra­ ditional] pattern appears so regularly in the work of contemporary poets” (94). Several twentieth-century poets have at least one sestina to their credit. W.H. Auden published seven, and James K. Baxter, a dozen. Fred Cogswell’s most recent (and rather anomalous) collection is entitled Meditations: 50 Sestinas. Thus, in an age dominated by poetry increasingly independent of traditional verse forms, it is worth enquiring into the special attractions of this intricate and highly structured form. Cummins suggests that “in an age of societal and political confusion and alarm, or metaphysical uncertainty and despair, perhaps the extreme order inherent in the sestina is especially attractive to poets and readers alike” (16). I should like to take his com­ ments a few steps further by arguing that it is through dualistic attempts to subvert while nevertheless reinforcing that order that contemporary poets exploit the possibilities of the sestina most fully and satisfactorily. Generally acknowledged, although not without some disagreement (David­ son 18-19), as the invention of Arnaut Daniel, twelfth-century Provençal poet and mathematician, the sestina is a thirty-nine line poem, compris­ ing six six-line stanzas, whose “lines may be of any single length” (Dacey and Jauss 443), followed by a three-line stanza, variously termed an envoi, commiato, congedo, or, most commonly, tornada. Each major stanza is char­ acterized by rhyme-words rather than rhymes, words at the end of each line that do not rhyme within particular stanzas but are repeated throughout all six stanzas according to a strict and elegant mathematical formula, being paired from the outside inward and reversed from stanza to stanza. Thus, as the sestina progresses, the rhyme-words of lines one and six of the initial stanza are paired and reversed to become, respectively, the rhyme-words of lines two and one of the succeeding stanza, the rhyme-words of lines two and five are paired and reversed to become those of lines four and three, and the rhyme-words of lines three and four are paired and reversed to become E n g l is h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , x v i i i , 2, June 1992 those of lines six and five. After six stanzas this pattern has completed a full circle, so that the rhyme-words of a full seventh stanza, if there were one, would necessarily be in the same order as those of the first. Instead of this repetition, then, the rhyme-words are distributed throughout the three lines of the tornada, signifying (in a structural, if not necessarily in a se­ mantic sense) a necessary and satisfying closure to the pattern. The sestina displays, through this patterned dance of its rhyme-words, its affinities with other popular Provençal forms originally intended to accompany a circular dance (Davidson 19). The kaleidoscopic patterns afforded by this formula make the sestina at­ tractive to many poets intrigued with its formal possibilities, particularly with the possibilities of breaking away from the constraints of such a rigor­ ous structure. Yet this rigorous structure, with its formulaic pattern, does make the writing of second-rate sestinas notoriously easy. As Cummins has noted, critical opinion on the sestina has been divided for reasons of form, its detractors calling it a mere exercise in technique, and its proponents extolling it as an excellent form for a meditation or reverie (15). This am­ bivalent attitude has not escaped the attention of the poets, either, and is perhaps best exemplified through a comparison of stanzas in two recent self-reflexive sestinas by Dana Gioia and Fred Cogswell. Gioia’s ironic deprecation...