The terzanelle, invented by Lewis Turco in 1965, is a poetic form that combines the terza rima’s end-line rhyme scheme with the villanelle’s refrain—hence “terzanelle”, from terza rima and villanelle. In fact, “Terzanelle” was the title of Turco’s first terzanelle poem—the first ever written—which was published in the summer edition of The Michigan Quarterly Review that same year. He has since written and published three more terzanelle poems over the years, “Terzanelle in Thunderweather” (The Book of Forms: University Press of New England, 2000), “The Room” (Poetry Miscellany, 1978), and “Terzanelle of the Spider’s Web” (The Southern Review, 1990).
Over the years Turco’s invention has become well known and popular. Hundreds of terzanelle poems may be found on the web by as many authors. Although Turco’s “Terzanelle in Thunderweather” is often quoted as an example of the poem’s structure, as I also do below, it is seldom—if ever—mentioned that Turco is in fact the inventor of this form.
Here are the rules by which a terzanelle poem may be written:
The terzanelle is comprised of at least two tercets and a closing quatrain. Item 4 below expands upon this general rule with commentary.
The first and third lines of the opening tercet are refrained as the second and fourth lines of the closing quatrain. This will be illustrated later using an actual terzanelle poem.
The terzanelle body is comprised of tercets that each refrain the second line of the preceding tercet for its third line. The first line of each of these tercets is rhymed with its refrained line. This will also be illustrated later.
There must be a minimum of one tercet for the body, but there may be as many tercets in the body as you think you can get away with. The opening tercet can be thought of as the head of the poem, the closing quatrain as the foot, and any tercets in between as the body.
I’m taking a liberty here in defining the terzanelle body. While Turco created the terzanelle as a fixed form of 19 lines (four tercets in the body), it seems clear to me that the terzanelle is stanzaic in nature. Turco’s terzanelles all follow the stanzaic structure of the villanelle, yet the terza rima may have as few or as many stanzas as desired. So, logically, since the terzanelle structure is derived from fusing the rhyme pattern of the terza rima with the opening and closing refrain structure of the villanelle, there is no real limit to the number of tercets the terzanelle poem may contain.
I myself have not written a terzanelle poem shorter than that of the 19 line form based on the villanelle, but my longest terzanelle poem, “Raven,” contains eight tercets in the body for a total of ten stanzas. I have in the past seen terzanelles that use a single tercet in the body for a total of three stanzas, but unfortunately I am now unable to remember where I saw them and who it was that wrote them. If you know of any, please comment so I can include one as an example to the shortened form.
The closing quatrain refrains the second line of the last tercet as its third line and rhymes its first line with that refrain. This as well will be illustrated in a moment.
Lines may be any length or meter within reason.
It can be especially interesting and melodic to alternate between two meters, such as octameters and hexameters, as I did with the poem “Baby Grand.”
Terzanelles may be written on any subject.
There is a pleasant shorthand notation for the first five points. For a 19 line terzanelle, this would be A1B1A2, bC1B1, cD1C1, dE1D1, eF1E1, fA1F1A2, where like letters indicate the rhyme scheme, and uppercase letters followed by a superscript numeric notation indicate the refrains. Using this, we can follow the rhyme and refrain pattern through “Terzanelle in Thunderweather”, Turco’s most well-known terzanelle poem mentioned above:
Terzanelle in Thunderweather
by Lewis Turco
As with the villanelle, one of the primary challenges with the terzanelle is finding a way to change the meaning or context of each refrain. In one way the terzanelle is a little easier than the villanelle in that there is a fresh refrain to work with for each tercet. In another way the terzanelle is much more difficult because each tercet must refrain a line from the previous tercet all the way through the poem and also because the two refrains from the opening tercet need to be woven in with a refrain from the final tercet in the closing quatrain. The latter, all on its own, has proven to be the most challenging aspect of the terzanelle for me.
A note on rhyme: To my mind, there is no reason to stick strictly to rhyme for the end-line scheme so long as some form of end-line parallelism is employed. There is much to explore, and I would encourage you to do so. I have myself used many alternative prosodic—and even semantic—devices in place of rhyme. Such devices have included consonance, assonance, alliteration, semantic associations and more. I have even combined different prosodic devices to good effect. For instance, in “Pestilence” one set of lines uses frame rhyme (alliteration and consonance with no assonance) while the other uses end-line assonance.
