Sestina -- from The Prentice Hall Anthology of American Literature

A sestina is a highly complicated verse form with 39 pentameter lines made up of six six-line stanzas (sextets) and a final envoy (triplet or tercet).

The sestina's stanzas have no rhyme in the conventional sense. Instead, in each stanza the same six end-words recur in a pattern unique to the sestina:

abcdef

faebdc

cfdabe

ecbfad

deacfb

bdfeca

eca (or) ace -- (or) aec (but this last one is not traditional)

In addition, all six of the end-words must appear in the concluding triplet.

In writing to her friend Marianne Moore (September 15, 1936), Bishop said that her use of the sestina form as "a sort of stunt." And critics of the sestina (especially the sestina written in English) argue that its complexity and repetitiveness often afford more pleasure to the poet who masters them than to the reader who must endure them.

Do the rhythms and poetic complexities of Bishop's sestina adequately fit the ideas of the poem? Would the poem have been more effective if it were written in, for example, unrhymed pentameter quatrains?