A villanelle is a nineteen line poem written in five three line stanzas followed by one four line stanza, built around two refrain lines that repeat on a fixed schedule through the whole poem. It began as a simple Italian and French song form, mostly pastoral and mostly forgettable, until English language poets in the twentieth century found something the earlier form never quite exploited: what happens to a line of text when you are forced to say it five or six times in a row, in a slightly different context each time.
The Strict Shape of a Villanelle
The rules are exact. The poem rhymes ABA in each of its five tercets, then ABAA in the closing quatrain, using only two rhyme sounds for all nineteen lines. The first line of the poem, call it A1, returns as the final line of the second, fourth, and final stanzas. The third line, call it A2, returns as the final line of the third, fifth, and final stanzas. That means the closing quatrain ends with both refrains back to back, A1 then A2, the only place in the poem where they appear together.
Written out like that, it can sound like a puzzle box, and in a sense it is one. A poet writing a villanelle is committing, before a word of the middle stanzas exists, to two lines that will have to bear an enormous amount of weight by the end of the poem. Choose two lines that are too flat, and the repetition will feel like padding. Choose two that are too ornate, and they will curdle by the fourth appearance. The form rewards a very particular kind of line: plain enough to survive repetition, strange enough to reward it.
Why Repetition Becomes Meaning
The real trick of the villanelle is that the refrain lines never actually change, but the poem around them does, and that shift in context does the work a poet would normally do by rewriting the line itself. A line that sounds like calm acceptance the first time it appears can sound like denial the second time, and like something closer to rage by the fifth, without a single word of it being altered. The form is, in that sense, a study in how much meaning lives outside the words themselves, in the accumulated weight of what has happened around them.
This is part of why the villanelle tends to attract poems about obsession, grief, or refusal, states of mind that already involve circling back to the same thought against one's own will. The form does not just describe that kind of repetition. It performs it.
A line that sounds like calm acceptance the first time can sound like something closer to rage by the fifth, without a single word being changed.
Dylan Thomas and the Villanelle at Its Most Urgent
The villanelle most people meet first, whether they know its name or not, is Dylan Thomas's poem written for his dying father, urging him not to accept death quietly. We have a full close reading of the poem on this site, so I will not repeat that work here, but it is worth pointing out what the poem demonstrates about the form itself. Its two refrains are commands, not observations, and commands gain a different kind of pressure with repetition than description does. By the closing quatrain, when both lines appear together for the first time, the poem has turned an abstract argument about death into something closer to a plea directed at one specific person, which is exactly the kind of shift the form is built to produce.
Other Villanelles Worth Reading
Elizabeth Bishop's “One Art” takes the form in almost the opposite emotional direction from Thomas, using its two refrains, one about the ease of losing things and one about mastering that loss, to build a poem that keeps insisting it is fine right up until the moment it visibly is not. Sylvia Plath's early villanelle “Mad Girl's Love Song” uses the form's circularity to mimic the loop of an obsessive thought, a technique she would return to across her career even after she stopped using the villanelle's strict rhyme scheme. W. H. Auden's “If I Could Tell You” is a quieter example, using its refrains to circle around a truth the speaker admits, right in the poem, that he cannot actually say directly.
How to Write One Yourself
If you want to try one, start with the two refrain lines before anything else, and read them aloud six or seven times in a row before you write a word around them. If they already sound tired by the fourth repetition, they are probably too thin to carry a whole poem. Look for two lines that can plausibly mean slightly different things depending on what comes before them, since that flexibility is what will let the poem develop rather than simply repeat. And do not be afraid to let the rhyme scheme push you toward a word or an image you would not have chosen on your own. Some of the strangest, most memorable turns in a villanelle come from a poet following the rhyme into unexpected territory rather than forcing the rhyme to follow the poet.
