A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem built on two refrains and two rhymes: five tercets rhymed ABA and a closing quatrain rhymed ABAA. Line 1 returns as lines 6, 12 and 18, line 3 returns as lines 9, 15 and 19, and the two refrains end the poem together as a couplet. The most famous villanelles, Dylan Thomas's “Do not go gentle into that good night” and Elizabeth Bishop's “One Art,” are still in copyright, so this page describes them and quotes the public-domain villanelle poem examples that came before: from Jean Passerat's in 1606 to the one James Joyce gave his hero in 1916, plus two new ones.
All nine examples are complete poems: seven published between 1606 and 1916 and two written for this page. The famous modern villanelles are described further down but not quoted or counted. Each example comes with a note on how its refrains behave, which is where the form succeeds or fails. The guide to repetition covers refrains in general; this page is about the one form that is made of almost nothing else.
| Section | What you'll find | Villanelles |
|---|---|---|
| SectionThe form | What you'll findThe nineteen lines, slot by slot | Villanelles– |
| SectionPasserat's model | What you'll findThe lost turtledove that later poets took as the pattern, in French and in English | Villanelles1 |
| SectionVictorian villanelles | What you'll findHenley, Wilde and Gosse | Villanelles2–4 |
| SectionThe 1890s to 1916 | What you'll findDowson, Robinson and the villanelle in Joyce's novel | Villanelles5–7 |
| SectionModern villanelles | What you'll findThomas, Bishop, Roethke, Plath, Auden, Empson, described | Villanelles– |
| SectionNew villanelles | What you'll findA daughter's visits, a writer's excuses | Villanelles8–9 |
How a villanelle is built
Call the first line A1 and the third line A2. They rhyme with each other, and every other A line rhymes with them. The middle line of each stanza takes the second rhyme, b.
| Stanza | Lines | Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| StanzaTercet 1 | Lines1–3 | PatternA1 b A2 |
| StanzaTercet 2 | Lines4–6 | Patterna b A1 |
| StanzaTercet 3 | Lines7–9 | Patterna b A2 |
| StanzaTercet 4 | Lines10–12 | Patterna b A1 |
| StanzaTercet 5 | Lines13–15 | Patterna b A2 |
| StanzaQuatrain | Lines16–19 | Patterna b A1 A2 |
So the refrains fill eight of the nineteen lines, and you need seven different words on the A rhyme (two in the refrains, five more) and six on the b rhyme. Meter is not fixed: pentameter is common, but the older villanelles below run in lines of three and four beats. What makes the form hard is not the counting. It is finding two lines that can be said four times each and mean more every time.
The model villanelle: Passerat
The word comes from the Italian villanella, a rustic song or dance, from villano, peasant. Early villanelles had pastoral subjects and refrains but no fixed shape. The poem that later writers treated as the model is this one by the French poet Jean Passerat, published in 1606.
J'ay perdu ma tourterelle;
Est-ce-point elle que i'oy?
Je veux aller après elle.
Tu regrettes ta femelle;
Hélas! aussy fay-je moy:
J'ay perdu ma tourterelle.
Si ton amour est fidèle,
Aussy est ferme ma foy;
Je veux aller après elle.
Ta plainte se renouvelle?
Toujours plaindre je me doy:
J'ay perdu ma tourterelle.
En ne voyant plus la belle
Plus rien de beau je ne voy:
Je veux aller après elle.
Mort, que tant de fois j'appelle,
Prens ce qui se donne à toy:
J'ai perdu ma tourterelle,
Je veux aller après elle.
I have lost my turtledove:
isn’t that her I hear?
I want to go after her.
You miss your mate;
alas, so do I:
I have lost my turtledove.
If your love is faithful,
so too is my faith firm;
I want to go after her.
Your lament begins again?
I must lament forever:
I have lost my turtledove.
No longer seeing the fair one,
I see nothing fair at all:
I want to go after her.
Death, whom I call so often,
take what is offered you:
I have lost my turtledove,
I want to go after her.
The speaker talks to another dove that has lost its mate. Everything later writers counted is here: nineteen lines, two rhymes (-elle and -oy), two refrains that alternate and then meet. Notice how the second refrain changes without changing a word. “I want to go after her” sounds like longing in the first stanza and, once Death is called in the last, like a wish to die.
Whether Passerat meant to found a form is another matter. The French poet Théodore de Banville set out the rules in his Petit traité de poésie française (1872), and English poets took them up from there. In “The Myth of the Fixed-Form Villanelle” (2003), the scholar Julie Kane argued that the fixed shape came from a later editor's additions to a French rhyming dictionary, not from any long tradition. The rules are younger than they look.
Victorian villanelle examples
After Banville, a group of English poets including Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, Andrew Lang, W. E. Henley and Oscar Wilde took up the French fixed forms. Gleeson White's anthology Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c. (1887) printed 32 English villanelles by 19 poets. These three come from it.
A dainty thing's the Villanelle.
Sly, musical, a jewel in rhyme,
It serves its purpose passing well.
A double-clappered silver bell
That must be made to clink in chime,
A dainty thing's the Villanelle;
And if you wish to flute a spell,
Or ask a meeting 'neath the lime,
It serves its purpose passing well.
You must not ask of it the swell
Of organs grandiose and sublime—
A dainty thing's the Villanelle;
And, filled with sweetness, as a shell
Is filled with sound, and launched in time,
It serves its purpose passing well.
Still fair to see and good to smell
As in the quaintness of its prime,
A dainty thing's the Villanelle,
It serves its purpose passing well.
A villanelle about villanelles, and a good summary of what the Victorians thought the form was for: small, musical, ornamental. Its own image fits: a bell with two clappers, ringing two notes. Henley warns against asking it for the swell of an organ. The twentieth century asked exactly that, and the most famous villanelles are about death and loss.
O Singer of Persephone!
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily?
Still through the ivy flits the bee
Where Amaryllis lies in state;
O Singer of Persephone!
Simætha calls on Hecate,
And hears the wild dogs at the gate;
Dost thou remember Sicily?
Still by the light and laughing sea
Poor Polypheme bemoans his fate;
O Singer of Persephone!
And still in boyish rivalry
Young Daphnis challenges his mate:
Dost thou remember Sicily?
Slim Lacon keeps a goat for thee;
For thee the jocund shepherds wait;
O Singer of Persephone!
Dost thou remember Sicily?
The refrains are an address and a question, both to Theocritus, the Greek pastoral poet of Sicily, now among the dead in Persephone's underworld. Each middle tercet calls up a figure from his poems: the sorceress Simaetha, the Cyclops Polyphemus, the herdsman Daphnis. By the end the question has a second meaning: whether the dead poet remembers his island, and whether his island, still full of his characters, remembers him.
Wouldst thou not be content to die
When low-hung fruit is hardly clinging,
And golden Autumn passes by?
Beneath this delicate rose-gray sky,
While sunset bells are faintly ringing,
Wouldst thou not be content to die?
For wintry webs of mist on high
Out of the muffled earth are springing,
And golden Autumn passes by.
O now when pleasures fade and fly,
And Hope her southward flight is winging,
Wouldst thou not be content to die?
Lest Winter come, with wailing cry
His cruel icy bondage bringing,
When golden Autumn hath passed by.
And thou, with many a tear and sigh,
While life her wasted hands is wringing,
Shall pray in vain for leave to die
When golden Autumn hath passed by.
Watch the refrains bend. The second one shifts from “passes by” to “hath passed by,” so autumn goes from present to gone; and in line 18 the first refrain is replaced by its opposite, a prayer to die that comes too late. Gosse was one of the poets who brought the form into English, and already he treats the refrains as lines that can change when the poem needs them to.
Villanelles from the 1890s to 1916
By the end of the century the form had moved from parlor games to darker material. These three are the bridge to the modern villanelle: plainer words, shorter lines and refrains that carry real weight.
Wine and woman and song,
Three things garnish our way:
Yet is day over long.
Lest we do our youth wrong,
Gather them while we may:
Wine and woman and song.
Three things render us strong,
Vine leaves, kisses and bay;
Yet is day over long.
Unto us they belong,
Us the bitter and gay,
Wine and woman and song.
We, as we pass along,
Are sad that they will not stay;
Yet is day over long.
Fruits and flowers among,
What is better than they:
Wine and woman and song?
Yet is day over long.
Three beats a line, and two refrains that argue with each other: a motto of pleasure and a weary sigh. The middle tercets build the case for pleasure, and the sighs keep undercutting it. In the last stanza the motto turns into a question, changed only by a question mark, and the sigh gets the final word.
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.
The plainest refrains imaginable, and that is the point. “There is nothing more to say” keeps being said, which is exactly what grief does. Robinson asks the real question in the fourth tercet (why do we keep coming back?) and answers it with the form itself: the poem keeps coming back too.
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.
And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
A villanelle inside a novel. Stephen Dedalus wakes toward dawn and composes it in bed, and Joyce shows the lines arriving one at a time, between his thoughts about the girl they are for. Read on its own, the poem is lush and a little overdressed, all seraphim and chalices, which is part of what Joyce is showing: a young writer's taste at a particular age.
Famous modern villanelles
The villanelle's great period came in the twentieth century, when poets used its obsessive repetition for grief, loss and resistance. These poems are still in copyright, so they are described here, not quoted. All are easy to find in anthologies and on their publishers' sites.
- Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night” (collected in In Country Sleep, 1952). Addressed to the speaker's dying father. The two refrains urge him to fight death rather than accept it, and each middle tercet names a kind of man, wise, good, wild or grave, who resists at the end.
- Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” (1976). A villanelle about losing things, from keys and wasted hours to houses, cities and a continent, and finally a person. Bishop changes the second refrain every time it returns, and in the last line the speaker has to interrupt herself, in parentheses, to get the sentence out.
- Theodore Roethke, “The Waking.” The title poem of The Waking: Poems 1933–1953, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. Its refrains are two paradoxes about waking and learning, repeated until they sound like wisdom.
- Sylvia Plath, “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” An early Plath villanelle in which a young woman suspects she has invented the man she loves.
- W. H. Auden, “If I Could Tell You.” A villanelle in which time knows what the speaker can't say.
- William Empson, “Missing Dates.” A grim villanelle about waste and time running out, by the poet who helped revive the form in English in the 1930s.
Poets have also stretched the rules. The terzanelle crosses the villanelle with terza rima, and Billy Collins invented the paradelle as a parody of the villanelle.
Two new villanelles
One serious and one comic, both written for this page. The first keeps strict pentameter and lets the refrains shift in the last two stanzas; the second runs in four-beat lines and breaks its own refrain for the joke.
She asks me if my father called today.
I hang her cardigans, the blue, the white.
I tell her yes, he’s fine, he’s just away.
She nods. The window turns from gold to gray.
A cart goes squeaking past. They dim the light.
She asks me if my father called today.
We do the crossword: “Linger,” four. It’s “stay.”
She gets it first. She always got them right.
I tell her yes, he’s fine, he’s just away.
He died eleven years ago. I play
along. The nurses told me: never fight.
She asks me if my father called today.
Then, driving home, I nearly call to say
that she was good tonight, that she was bright,
and tell myself he’s fine, he’s just away.
I keep his number. It’s still filed as Ray.
Tomorrow, at the window, sitting tight,
she’ll ask me if my father called today.
I’ll tell her yes. He’s fine. He’s just away.
A villanelle suits a mind that repeats itself, so the refrains are the mother's question and the child's answer. The fourth tercet states the fact the refrains avoid, and after it the same words read differently: the question becomes a symptom, and “just away” becomes the family's word for dead. Then the turn: in the fifth tercet the second refrain changes from “I tell her” to “and tell myself,” and the lie becomes the speaker's own. The closing couplet moves both refrains into the future, which is the saddest change of all.
I’ll write the chapter after nine.
First, coffee. Then I’ll check the mail.
Till then, the chapter’s doing fine.
I’ll sort the bookshelf, spine by spine,
and learn the lifespan of a snail.
I’ll write the chapter after nine.
The cursor blinks its little line.
I’ll clean the keyboard with a nail.
Till then, the chapter’s doing fine.
My heroine is down a mine
since March. Her flashlight’s going pale.
I’ll write the chapter after nine.
I’ll water every plant and vine
and fold the laundry, bale by bale.
Till then, the chapter’s doing fine.
It’s nine. The light is in decline.
Down in the mine, she starts to wail.
I’ll write the chapter after nine
tomorrow. She’ll be doing fine.
Procrastination is a natural subject for a form that keeps promising and never arrives. The comedy comes from escalation, from a snail to a heroine trapped in a mine with a dying flashlight. “Till then, the chapter's doing fine” is a shrug the first time; once she has been down the mine since March, the same words are a joke at the writer's expense. The last refrain runs over the line break (“after nine / tomorrow”), and the second refrain changes from the chapter to the heroine, who is plainly not doing fine.
How to write a villanelle
The refrains decide everything, so they come first. For a ready subject, the poetry prompts suggest making the refrain something you say too often.
- Write the two refrains first
They must rhyme with each other, each must make sense on its own, and together they should form a couplet worth ending on. Read the pair aloud. If the couplet doesn't move you now, nineteen lines are unlikely to rescue it.
- Build two rhyme banks
You need five more words on the A rhyme and six on the b rhyme. List at least ten for each before you draft. One-syllable words are the most flexible, and a few slant rhymes, used on purpose, can loosen a poem that sounds too neat.
- Give each tercet a job
A scene, a fact, a memory, a question, a confession. In “Visiting Hours” the tercets go from the room to the crossword to the truth to the drive home. If two tercets do the same job, the refrain lands the same way twice and the poem stalls.
- Let the refrains change meaning
The same words can mean more after a new stanza, as in Passerat's poem. You can also change them a little, as Gosse and Bishop do: a tense, a pronoun, a question mark. Make each change deliberate, and save the biggest for late in the poem.
- Make the quatrain earn the couplet
Lines 16 and 17 set up the final pairing. Use them for the poem's last new information, so that the two refrains, side by side at last, say something neither says alone.
- Read it aloud
Repetition that looks fine on the page can drone when spoken. Vary the sentence lengths, run some sentences across line breaks, and check that the refrains sit naturally in the grammar around them.
To check the scaffolding, ask the Strokes Assistant whether lines 6, 12 and 18 repeat line 1, whether 9, 15 and 19 repeat line 3, and which lines drift off the two rhymes.
Villanelle mistakes to avoid
| Mistake | What happens | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| MistakeRefrains that can't stand alone | What happensThe line only makes sense after the one before it | The fixWrite each refrain as a complete sentence or phrase |
| MistakeRefrains that never change meaning | What happensThe poem repeats instead of developing | The fixChange the context in each tercet so the line lands differently |
| MistakeRunning out of A rhymes | What happensWrenched word order or filler near lines 13 and 16 | The fixBank seven or more A words before drafting |
| MistakeMiddle tercets with the same job | What happensThe poem stalls between refrains | The fixGive each tercet a new scene, fact or question |
| MistakeA final couplet that just stops | What happensThe refrains sit together and say nothing new | The fixUse lines 16 and 17 to change what the pairing means |
| MistakeUneven line lengths by accident | What happensSome lines feel crowded, others thin | The fixPick a line length and keep it, or vary it on purpose |
The refrains work the way a motif does in fiction: each return gathers what happened since the last one. That is also why the villanelle sits so close to the ballad, whose refrains and repeated questions build a story the same way; the ballad examples show the older version of the trick. For a form with a single turn instead of a returning refrain, read the sonnet examples.
Frequently asked questions
Does a villanelle have to be in iambic pentameter?
No. Many twentieth-century villanelles use pentameter, but the form fixes the rhymes and refrains, not the meter. Wilde and Henley wrote theirs in four-beat lines, and Dowson's "Villanelle of the Poet's Road" and Robinson's "The House on the Hill" use lines of only three beats. Whatever you choose, keep it steady, or vary it on purpose.
Can you change the refrains in a villanelle?
Yes, within reason. Small changes in wording or punctuation are an accepted part of the form and often carry the poem's turn: Gosse shifts "passes by" to "hath passed by," Dowson turns his motto into a question, and Bishop alters her second refrain every time it returns. Change too much, though, and the reader stops hearing a refrain at all.
Did Jean Passerat invent the villanelle?
Not exactly. The name comes from the Italian villanella, a rustic song, and earlier villanelles were country songs with refrains but no fixed shape. Passerat's poem of 1606 became the model for the nineteen-line form, but the rules were set down much later, notably by Théodore de Banville in 1872, and the scholar Julie Kane traces them to additions made to a French rhyming dictionary.
