Information about the villanelle is abundant. Two good sources are The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (3rd ed.), published by Princeton University Press in 1993, and The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2001. In the first, an article on the villanelle provides detailed information about the form’s development and mentions the most prominent European and American poets to publish villanelles since the 16th century. In the latter, a brief history of the form is explored as relates to the first known author—French poet Jean Passerat—to publish the common 19 line variety of the villanelle. 14 villanelles are also reproduced as anthologized examples. Of course, a search on the internet will yield much information about the form and lead to scores of examples.
Since ample information about the villanelle’s history and origins is already available, I will focus on a discussion of its structure and offer some insights I’ve gained after having taken the time to write a couple dozen such poems.
There are ten points to consider when writing a villanelle poem:
The villanelle is comprised of at least three tercets and a closing quatrain.
The first and third lines of the opening tercet begin the A1 and A2 refrains, respectively. These lines rhyme, establishing the a rhyme used in all subsequent stanzas.
The second line of the opening tercet establishes the b rhyme used in all subsequent stanzas.
The villanelle’s body is comprised of tercets appearing in pairs. So you can think of the opening tercet as the head of the poem, all tercet pairs together as the body of the poem, and the closing quatrain as the foot.
The third line of the first tercet of each pair uses the A1 refrain, and the third line of the second tercet of each pair uses the A2 refrain.
The first and second lines of each tercet in the body use the a and b rhyme, respectively.
There must be a minimum of one tercet pair for the body, so as to make even use of the A1 and the A2 refrains, but there may be as many tercet pairs as you think you can get away with.
In the closing quatrain, the third and fourth lines repeat the A1 and A2 refrains, respectively. The first and second lines once again use the a and b rhyme.
As an English art form, there are no restrictions pertaining to meter. So, lines may be any length in any meter—within reason. To my thinking, however, villanelles do seem to read and flow best when a consistent meter or pattern of meters is employed.
Villanelles may be written on any subject in any voice or style.
These points may seem overly detailed, but presenting the rules in this manner allows for absolute clarity. A pleasant shorthand notation for the first eight points is A1bA2, abA1, abA2, …, abA1A2, where like letters indicate the rhyme scheme, uppercase letters followed by a numeric notation indicate refrains, and the ellipsis indicates additional tercet pairs of the body. Using this, we can follow the rhyme and refrain pattern through Dylan Thomas’ well-known villanelle, titled after its first line:
Do not go gentle into that good night
by Dylan Thomas
This villanelle uses the 19 line model most commonly adhered to (two tercet pairs in the body). Referencing the two sources of information mentioned in the opening paragraph above, you will find that Jean Passerat is likely responsible for establishing this rigid model. However, throughout time many poets have treated the villanelle as a stanzaic form of poetry that may be expanded or contracted so long as the rhyme and refrain are not compromised.
This means the villanelle can be 13 lines at its shortest, consisting of the opening tercet (3 lines), one tercet pair in the body (3 lines each), and the closing quatrain (4 lines). This will use each refrain three times. Consider that this is only one line shy of a sonnet in length, making it a viable option for those who like to explore and write short-form poems.
The standard 19 line model uses each refrain four times, so it is useful to come up with refrains that are versatile enough to take on changes in meaning and context, or they can overpower the poem causing it to have a predictable and robotic feel. If at all possible, there should be something dynamic and full of energy in the refrains. For instance, Dylan Thomas’ A2 refrain from the example above, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, represents a special and inspired sort of luck on this front. With a refrain like that, Dylan could have written gibberish in the remaining lines and still ended up with a strong piece of poetry.
If you go a step further to longer form villanelles, then the refrains repeat even more, and the versatility and potency of the refrains become even more important. For instance, each refrain will repeat five times in the 25 line villanelle (three tercet pairs), and six times in the 31 line form (four tercet pairs), and so on. Although I’ve written 23 villanelles in all, at the time this posting, I’ve never felt a desire to go beyond the 19 line structure. For nearly every purpose, it’s more than adequate. In fact, I’ve not yet even seen a longer form villanelle. If you know of one, leave a comment indicating where I may find and possibly link to it.
What may be more challenging than the reuse of entire lines multiple times throughout the poem is the extended use of rhyme. The a rhyme is used seven times in the standard villanelle form—Twice in the opening tercet and once in each stanza that follows. The b rhyme is used six times—On the second line of each stanza throughout. English is not what you could call a rhyme-rich language. In fact, probably any combination of rhymes you could possibly come up with has at some point already been used. So, though the villanelle form uses an end-line rhyme as part of its structure, I don’t think anyone should be afraid to use other phonemic or semantic end-line parallelisms instead.
For instance, my poem “Culture” uses end-line consonance for the a scheme and end-line assonance for the b scheme. In fact I’ve experimented quite a lot with alternatives to rhyme, with varying degrees of success. More examples of alternative approaches to the end-line scheme include: “Pilgrim”, which uses primary (the accented syllable) end-line consonance for the a scheme and secondary (the unaccented syllable) consonance for the b scheme; “Night Walk”, which uses end-line assonance for the a scheme and end-line consonance with partial assonance (also called “slant” rhyme) for the b scheme; and “sunyata”, which uses end-line alliteration with the refrains of each tercet for the a scheme and partial frame-rhyme (alliteration and consonance without assonance) for the b scheme. In other poems I have experimented with using purely semantic parallelisms in place of the end-line rhyme, such as in “sea dog”, which experiments with end-line devices such as synonymy and antithesis.
When you encounter a form like the villanelle, I think it best to think of the form’s rules as a basic framework from which you may expand, so long as you stay within the general structure. And there is no reason why such expansions can’t also be called villanelles. To my mind, if you follow the villanelle structure for 31 lines (four tercet pairs) and use end-line alliteration instead of rhyme, it really is still a villanelle. If you do experiment, and you find your contemporaries pedantically naysaying your hard work telling you it’s not a villanelle because it’s not 19 lines or because there is no rhyme, you may have to educate them. You can always send them here.
