Villanelle (poetry)

Created: March 14, 2021 11:17 AM
Forest status: #soil
Last Edited: June 28, 2021 9:30 PM
Retention Rating: #3⭐⭐⭐
Review Due: August 1, 2021 9:30 PM

This very restrictive verse form presents a challenge to the poet, since it hinges on the repeated use of two refrains.

As its name suggests, the villanelle is a French verse form, yet this French form took its name from an Italian one: the word derives from villanella, a form of Italian part-song which originated in Naples in the sixteenth century. Yet English poetry, rather than French or Italian, has become the naturalised home of the villanelle. This intriguing verse form comprises 19 lines made up of five tercets (three-line stanzas) and a concluding quatrain. As the Oxford English Dictionary summarises it, ‘The first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated alternately in the succeeding stanzas as a refrain, and form a final couplet in the quatrain.’ An example of how the villanelle works in practice can be seen in an early example in English, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Theocritus: A Villanelle’ from 1890:

O singer of Persephone!
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily?

Still through the ivy flits the bee
Where Amaryllis lies in state;
O Singer of Persephone!

Simaetha calls on Hecate
And hears the wild dogs at the gate;
Dost thou remember Sicily?

And so on. Although it remains a niche form, some fantastic poems have been written using the villanelle form in the twentieth century, including W. H. Auden’s ‘If I Could Tell You’, William Empson’s ‘Missing Dates’, and Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’. We have a fuller history of the villanelle here.