Poetic Forms: The Villanelle

The villanelle is a beautiful and haunting form that began in French and took on its present shape in the mid-nineteenth century, according to Amanda French.

It’s a demanding form in many ways. The first and third lines of the villanelle have to repeat throughout the poem in a set order. If the poet uses rhyme, only two rhymes are permitted in the entire poem.

The villanelle was originally a song form for country dances. The name derives from the Italian villano, which means “peasant” or “boor.” But there is nothing boorish about this form. It is very much like a country dance, though, with its deliberate repetitions and variations. Folk dances often take the participants through a series of steps that mirror one another from different angles and with different partners, but then wind up more or less where they started. 

French country dance

Here’s a video of a charming traditional French folk dance, for example, that has a theme and variations pattern similar to a villanelle. The pattern of the villanelle makes much more sense when you think about its origins in folk dance.

The Academy of American Poets website describes the form this way:

“The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.” 

Of course, slight variations on the repeated lines are allowed, even encouraged.

You’ve undoubtedly seen villanelles, even if you weren’t aware that was the form you were reading. Some of the most famous villanelles in English are “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”

The most challenging aspect of the villanelle, from my standpoint, is that the refrains, the two lines that repeat, have to occur four times each in the space of the poem’s nineteen lines. Not only that, the two refrains have to rhyme. 

One approach to these limitations is to choose refrains that are fairly general, and can reoccur in several contexts without stretching their meaning. W.H. Auden, for example, in his villanelle “If I Could Tell You,” begins his poem:

Time will say nothing but I told you so,

Time only knows the price we have to pay;

If I could tell you I would let you know.

Lines as general as “Time will say nothing but I told you so,” and  “If I could tell you I would let you know,” can make sense in many contexts, and Auden ingeniously creates several settings for these lines in his poem. 

W. H. Auden

That flexibility is a plus of a vanilla refrain. On the other hand, choosing fairly neutral refrains means that eight of your poem’s nineteen lines are something of a throwaway in terms of their poetic energy. 

To me, a more exciting solution to the villanelle’s restrictions is to pick two absolutely killer lines that bear repeating four times each. Dylan Thomas accomplishes this brilliantly:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In the first four words of the poem, he strategically violates the rules of grammar by using “gentle” instead of the adverb “gently” to modify the verb “go.” He also creates a sonorous but not predictable alliteration with “go,” “gentle,” and “good.” He embeds a paradox in just eight words: the “good night” is actually something to be resisted.

In Dylan Thomas’s second refrain, the repetition of the powerful word “Rage” at the start is unforgettable. It also adds assonance to the word “rave” in the previous line. “Light” and “night” are a dynamic pairing for the two main rhymes in the poem. 

The problem with the killer refrain is that it has to be complex enough—linguistically and emotionally—to merit all those repetitions.

Keep in mind that once you’ve written the first tercet, you’ve also written the last two lines of your villanelle, so plan ahead. Your two refrains have to work not only as a beginning but as an ending, and they have to continually surprise the reader. Easier said than done!

One good thing about the repeating lines in a villanelle: as the poet George Higgins put it, “As soon as you’ve started your poem, you’re already a third of the way done!”

Read Zack Rogow’s villanelle, “Film Noir”

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, including his villanelle, “Film Noir”
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Editing by Rewriting from Scratch

When we edit, most of us tend to tinker. We substitute a word or phrase here, we prune a word or two there. We don’t make major changes in any draft. Essentially, we like our own words (who doesn’t?) and we want to keep as many of them as we can. We do that even when we know that a poem or work of fiction or nonfiction that we’ve written isn’t working.

But is tinkering always the best method of fixing something? Many times, when we alter just a little here and there, we are missing an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of a particular draft. It often takes a flawed draft to give us the clue to what our idea really requires. Sometimes the idea needs not what we wrote in our first attempt, or even the fifth attempt. In some cases, we’ve just got to start over.

That may feel like failure. It isn’t. It’s important to see the early drafts of a work of writing not as emeralds, but as tentative experiments, attempts. It’s difficult to do that, since our writings are often as close as we get to our innermost thoughts and deepest insights. But insights usually don’t arrive fully tailored. Sometimes we can’t just sew on a button, we have to begin with a whole new pattern.

I love the example of this sort of editing that I learned about from Professor David Thorburn, who taught the course I took on the modern British novel at Yale around 1973. If I’m not misquoting Professor Thorburn (and my apologies if I am!), D.H. Lawrence wrote his masterpiece, Women in Love, eight separate times. 

D.H. Lawrence

I don’t mean that Lawrence edited the same manuscript eight times. No, he started all over from Chapter One eight different times. That doesn’t mean he kept nothing from the earlier drafts. No doubt there were sections that worked in the very first version. But each time Lawrence began to write from the beginning with no preconceptions about how the book would progress or turn out—or so I like to think.

I’ve recently been trying out a similar method of editing with my own poems. I find this particularly useful for poetry in a lyric form. If one version doesn’t work, it often is self-defeating to edit that version, since any error ripples through the entire form of the poem. It’s better to start fresh, with new rhymes, for instance, or new repeating elements, possibly snatched from an earlier draft, but reused in a different context.

I recently attempted to write a villanelle for the first time. In a villanelle, the poet has to include two lines that are flexible and resonant enough to appear four times each in the poem. 

For instance, take Dylan Thomas’s iconic villanelle, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” 

Dylan Thomas

In that poem, the two famous refrains are:

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Imagine if Thomas had initially selected as a refrain not one of those lines, but a different line in the poem, say the second line, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day”?  It might put too much emphasis on the idea of burning or raving to mention them four times. With four uses of the word “burn,” the poem would have a much more religious undertone, since it would evoke burning in hell. The word “rave” occurring in four places might make give the poem too hysterical a note. If those were not the foci Thomas wanted, the current line 2 would not have worked as a refrain. It would have served his purposes better to start over with a different refrain and rewrite the whole poem, rather than to try to tweak that line in some minor way.

There’s another reason we prefer to tinker rather than to rebuild from the ground up—tinkering is a lot less work. But ultimately, several pieces of flawed work that produce nothing usable are much less productive than a lot of work that results in writing worth sending out into the world.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry