Sestina on Sestinas

The Assignment is to Write A Sestina
The Editors We Dare Not to Cross
Lest They Throw Out Both the Work and the Poet.
But, Alas!, the Sestina is Not Easy to Love...
And the Writing of One Can Seem Like a Penance.
Even Reading It, Down to the End, Its Tercet

(Six verses of Six Lines, and THEN a Tercet:
Thirty nine lines to create a Sestina)
Thirty Nine Whole Lines of Most Poems serves as a Penance
For a monumental set of Sins, and will cross
O'er the Ability of even Patient Readers who Love
The Output of Even a Sesquepedalian Poet.

Araut Daniel de Ruberae was the Poet
Whose Six Lines by Six Verses followed by a Tercet
Became a Poetry Form Only a Professor Could Love...
And Professors and Poets Love the Complicated Sestina
And the End Word Pattern of the Retrograde Cross
The Retrogradatio Cruciata (on which may they long Pay Penance).

And should Associated Content join in that Payment Penance?
To ask their Readers to Suffer through the Output of the Poet
Bound by the End Word Pattern of a Retrograde Cross
Trudging hopefully, tirelessly, tiredingly! towards the Tercet
Which will Finally End The Sestina...
So like the Adolescent Scholar who can only Love

A Subject When the the Class is Over, But Cannot Love
It In Its Midst. For that teenager School Is the Penance.
We Can Only Hope the Current Readers Penance is Not This Sestina.
Araut Daniel inspired both Petrarch and Dante, each man a poet,
Three poets a trio, or maybe they together would be a Tercet?
Dante called Daniel "the Better Craftsman", but seemed Cross

But Dante was writing the Divine Comedy, so being cross
Seems right. He put Daniel in the doing time for Love,
or Lust, more rightly. He's a veritable Tercet
of Sin Embodied! So forever in a book doing Penance
For being what Petrarch called "the Grandmaster of Love" poet.
Embodied in a book, a Grandmaster, and the Daddy of the Sestina.

Almost eight hundred years since the Cross patterned Penance...
There was complicated Love in this Form by the Poet.
The end is an Envoi, in the Form of Tercet, of this Sestina.