from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun A group of six lines of poetry, especially the last six lines of a Petrarchan sonnet.
noun A poem or stanza containing six lines.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun In music, same as sextet.
noun The two concluding stanzas of a sonnet, consisting of three lines each; the last six lines of a sonnet.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun (Mus.) A piece of music composed for six voices or six instruments; a sextet; -- called also sestuor.
noun (Poet.) The last six lines of a sonnet.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun music A piece of music composed for six voices or six instruments; a sextet or sestuor.
noun poetry The last sixlines of a poem.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun a rhythmic group of six lines of verse
noun a musical composition written for six performers
noun the cardinal number that is the sum of five and one
noun six performers or singers who perform together
noun a set of six similar things considered as a unit
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Italian sestetto, from sesto, sixth, from Latin sextus; see s(w)eks in Indo-European roots.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Italian sestetto, from sesto sixth, Latin sextus, from sex six.
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Examples
Notice the ways in which the problem/argument is posited in the octave and the solution/response is presented in the sestet; moreover, to further the problem/argument, Hopkins relies heavily upon cacophony in the octave but turns heavily to euphony in the sestet.
In the second sestet addressing the alluring features of the night, he finds the night too wonderful and May flowers too sweet to remain inside just mundanely sleeping.
Petrarch, of course, writes his sonnets in two parts: an octave and a sestet — in which the first eight lines pose a problem that the remaining six lines attempt to resolve.
Great Regulars: The sonnet is powered by the momentum established in the sestet, and somehow maintains the intensity of its indignation through the weaker octet--because the political emotion is genuine.
The work consists of 15 sonnets, all of which follow the Italian rhyme scheme and the division into octave and sestet, and each new poem takes up where the last one left off.
If the lover does in fact express his love via a sonnet, then the octave (represented here by the interrogative symbol raised to the eighth power) might encode the query: “Who do I love?” — to which the sestet (represented here by the letter U raised to the sixth power) might encode the reply: “You!”
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