Villanelle



A villanelle is a poetic form that entered English-language poetry in the 19th century from the imitation of French models. The word derives from the Italian villanella from Latin villanus (rustic). A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds. The first and third lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close. A villanelle is nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quatrain. Because of its non-linear structure, the villanelle resists narrative development. Villanelles do not tell a story or establish a conversational tone. In music, the villanelle is a dance form, accompanied by sung lyrics or an instrumental piece based on this dance form.

History
Many published works mistakenly claim that the strict modern form of the villanelle originated with the medieval troubadours, but in fact medieval and Renaissance villanelles were simple ballad-like songs with no fixed form or length. Such songs were associated with the country, and were thought to be sung by farmers and shepherds, in contrast to the more complex madrigals associated with sophisticated city and court life. The French word villanelle comes from the Italian word villanella, which derives from the Latin villa (house) and villano (farmhand); to any poet before the mid-19th century, the word villanelle or villanella would have simply meant country song, with no particular form implied.

The modern nineteen-line dual-refrain form of the villanelle derives from 19th-century admiration of the only Renaissance poem in that form: a poem about a turtledove titled "Villanelle" by Jean Passerat (1534–1602). The chief French popularizer of the villanelle form was the 19th-century author Théodore de Banville; Banville was led by Wilhelm Ténint to think that Passerat's villanelle was the antique form. Although the villanelle is usually labeled "a French form" (due to Passerat and Banville), by far the majority of villanelles are in English. Edmund Gosse, influenced by Banville, was the first English writer to praise the villanelle and bring it into fashion with his 1877 essay "A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse". Gosse, Austin Dobson, Oscar Wilde, and Edwin Arlington Robinson were among the first English practitioners. Most modernists disdained the villanelle, which became associated with the overwrought formal aestheticism of the 1890s; i.e. the decadent movement in England. In Canada, "Seranus" (Susan Frances Harrison), no doubt sharing the belief that it was a verse form of rural France, used it to craft a remarkable series of poems on rural French Canada; yet she was an isolated figure, influencing no other poets of her time.James Joyce included a villanelle ostensibly written by his adolescent fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus in his 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, possibly to show the immaturity of Stephen's literary abilities.

William Empson revived the villanelle more seriously in the 1930s, and his contemporaries and friends W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas also tried the form. Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all. Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote villanelles in the 1950s and 1960s, and Elizabeth Bishop composed a particularly famous and influential villanelle, "One Art", in 1976. The villanelle reached an unprecedented level of popularity in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of the New Formalism. Since then, many contemporary poets have written villanelles, and they have often varied the form in innovative ways.

Form
The villanelle has no established meter, although most 19th-century villanelles have used trimeter or tetrameter and most 20th-century villanelles have used pentameter. The essence of the fixed modern form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition. The rhyme-and-refrain pattern of the villanelle can be schematized as A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2 where letters ("a" and "b") indicate the two rhyme sounds, upper case indicates a refrain ("A"), and superscript numerals (1 and 2) indicate Refrain 1 and Refrain 2.
 * Refrain 1 (A1)
 * Line 2 (b)
 * Refrain 2 (A2)


 * Line 4 (a)
 * Line 5 (b)
 * Refrain 1 (A1)


 * Line 7 (a)
 * Line 8 (b)
 * Refrain 2 (A2)


 * Line 10 (a)
 * Line 11 (b)
 * Refrain 1 (A1)


 * Line 13 (a)
 * Line 14 (b)
 * Refrain 2 (A2)


 * Line 16 (a)
 * Line 17 (b)
 * Refrain 1 (A1)
 * Refrain 2 (A2)

Examples

 * Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas.
 * The Waking by Theodore Roethke.
 * Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath.
 * One Art by Elizabeth Bishop.
 * If I Could Tell You by W.H. Auden
 * Edwin Arlington Robinson's villanelle The House on the Hill was first published in The Globe in September 1894.


 * They are all gone away,
 * The House is shut and still,
 * There is nothing more to say.


 * Through broken walls and gray
 * The winds blow bleak and shrill.
 * They are all gone away.


 * Nor is there one to-day
 * To speak them good or ill:
 * There is nothing more to say.


 * Why is it then we stray
 * Around the sunken sill?
 * They are all gone away,


 * And our poor fancy-play
 * For them is wasted skill:
 * There is nothing more to say.


 * There is ruin and decay
 * In the House on the Hill:
 * They are all gone away,
 * There is nothing more to say.