The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Villanelle

Villanelle: A French verse form consisting of nineteen lines grouped in five tercets followed by a quatrain and involving only two rhymes, with the rhyme scheme aba aba aba aba aba abaa. The first line of the first tercet is repeated as the last line of the second and fourth tercets while the third line of the first tercet is repeated as the last line of the third and fifth tercets. Furthermore, both lines are repeated as a couplet in the last two lines of the quatrain. Sixteenth-century French poet Jean Passerat is generally credited with establishing the fixed form of the villanelle, which initially developed from Italian folk songs and entered English literature in the nineteenth century.

EXAMPLES: Passerat’s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” (“I Have Lost My Turtledove”) (written 1574; published 1606); W. E. Henley’s “Villanelle” (1888); Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The House on the Hill” (1894), which follows:

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.

Twentieth-century villanelles include Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (1951); Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (1954); Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (1976); and Martha Collins’s “The Story We Know” (1980), which employs incremental repetition in both repeated lines. More contemporary examples include Jared Carter’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses (1999), which he described in a 2008 interview in The New Formalist as a “configuration” of 32 villanelles, and Annie Diamond’s “The Difference Between Lack and Absence” (2013), written while Diamond was a college student.