Sestina, after Horace
by John Derbyshire, 1945-
• Background
From Louis Untermeyer's The Forms of Poetry (1926):
The sestina is, by all odds, the most complicated of the French forms. It is so lengthy and its technical construction is so involved that it is almost impossible to condense an outline of its construction here. Suffice it to say that the sestina is composed of six stanzas of six lines each, the lines of the six verses ending with the same six words, and the arrangement of these six terminal words following a definite and extremely complicated rule. To make the matter still more difficult, there is a final stanza of three lines in which all of the six words must be used, three at the ends and three in the middle of the lines. As may be imagined, the form is so intricate that most of the poems in this form are nothing more than technical exercises. However, Rudyard Kipling's "Sestina of the Tramp-Royal" is not only a particularly successful example, but a splendid poem in its own right, and Swinburne, for whom no form was complex enough, actually wrote a double sestina of twelve verses of twelve lines each — revolving through all its one hundred and fifty lines (there is a six-line envoy) on twelve words!
Never one to shirk a challenge, I've attempted a sestina here, loosely — very loosely — modeled on Horace's Ode 2.iii.
"Nothing more than a technical exercise" is about right, but I was pleased with myself just to have got the thing done.
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• Text of the poem
Into one vast urn — by whose hand
Shaped, moulded by what forgotten art,
None can know — our lots are cast.
All life can hold, all sufferings that we bear,
All joy and feasting, all are but the play
Of happenstance, since from the crib we rose
Unto the tomb, whence no man ever rose.
Remember, when the world is close at hand,
Remember, while relaxing at the play,
Or captured by the operatic art,
These pleasures light make easier to bear
The knowledge that some weightier die is cast.
Yet though for us that dreadful die is cast,
For whom but us comes forth the blushing rose?
Why should the earth its teeming wonders bear,
If not to grow in meaning by Man's hand —
If not to furnish substance for our art?
For whom but us do lambs in clover play?
And we — for whom is staged our little play?
While pebbles lightly into Fortune's pool we cast,
While bent to study courtship's specious art
(Amorous flowers, the too-soon-faded rose),
The Sisters pass dark threads from hand to hand.
Behind the sky, beyond the seven-starred Bear.
Antigonus was eaten by a bear,
Great Caesar murdered (in another play).
Through this we're shown, by Shakespeare's subtle hand
This world's a stage, ourselves the strutting cast.
But comes the end, no petals from the rose
Bestrew our stage, no plaudits greet our art.
All must die. Though there's relief in art,
The darkness falls at last. How few can bear
This truth! The beauty courted with a rose;
The dozing beggar; wastrels at their play;
High or low, no matter in what role we're cast —
The urn will tremble, shaken by a mighty hand.
The hand is Fate's, and she respects no art.
From out her urn is cast what all must bear;
The finis to our play, the withering of our rose.