A sestain is a six-line poem or repetitive unit of a poem of this format (musaddas), comparable to quatrain (Ruba'i in Persian and Arabic) which is a four-line poem or a unit of a poem. There are many types of sestain with different rhyme schemes, for example , , or. The sestain is probably next in popularity to the quatrain in European literature. Usually there are three rhymes in the six-line strophe, but sometimes there are only two.
The AABBCC is the simplest rhyme-scheme of the sestain. It was very popular in Old Polish poetry.
The rhyme-scheme is one of the most important forms in European poetry. It can be found in Thomas Campion's and Emma Lazarus's poetry. Juliusz SÃ Âowacki wrote his poem A Voyage to the Holy Land from Naples with the famous The Tomb of Agamemnon in stanzas.
It was probably borrowed from the Italian sonnet rhymed sometimes .
This rhyme scheme was extremely popular in French poetry. It was used by Victor Hugo and Charles Leconte de Lisle. In English it is called the tail-rhyme stanza. Bob Dylan uses it in several songs, including the A-strains of You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go and the B-strains of Key West (Philosopher Pirate). Rubén Dario and many Modernismo poets used rhyme scheme as well.
It is Burns's stanza.