The elegy: a sestina

Since mid-July, I’ve been attending via Zoom a class on traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet. Before this, I had never taken a class on poetry in my life, even though I’ve had poems published in many journals and anthologies. It’s been great because constructing a poem by the rules of a traditional form makes you think and makes you work! You can’t just throw something on the page; you have to consider every word, every syllable even.

In my most recent poetry class, the teacher educated us on the sestina, a very demanding form with rules for word repetition for specific lines. I’m not going to explain it, but basically I needed to track my writing with the alphabetically labeled lines of an Elizabeth Bishop poem provided by the teacher to get the basic form right.

I used the homework assignment to write a sestina to create my promised elegy to loss of friendship and friends. The length and repetition of the poetic form lends itself to my subject. However, the last stanza of my poem, though it follows the sestina rule of three ending lines with every repeating word from the previous stanzas in it, the lines themselves are in the form of a haiku. That simple, ancient Japanese poetry form is one of the only traditional forms I was ever taught in any class, and that was in elementary school!

This elegy may not be the best poem in the world, but it reflects the complexities of mourning for friends lost to time and our own human messiness.