ABSTRACT
The sestina is uniquely well-suited to dramatising situations in which a poetic speaker is at pains to make sense of something they can’t quite fathom. Since in reading a sestina we too often feel ourselves in the dark, groping along with the speaker for a conceptual light switch, it’s an excellent venue for simulating puzzlement. Surveying diverse instances of the form across literary history, we see that the sestina has been especially popular as a means of complaint. What sestina-writing poets are lamenting most fundamentally, this chapter argues, is the bewildering, often painful fact that human knowledge has limits.
