Villanelle

A villanelle (also known as villanesque) is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form.

Villanellas entered English-language poetry in the 19th century from the imitation of French models. 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. Because of its non-linear structure, the villanelle resists narrative development. Villanelles do not tell a story or establish a conversational tone. The villanelle's form, with a refrain in each stanza, indicates that the form descended from a "choral dance song," wherein "a vocal soloist, who was frequently a woman, semi-improvised the "unique" lyrics of each stanza, while a ring of dancers (all female, or male and female mixed) chimed in with the repetitive words of the refrain as they danced around her in a circle."

Etymology

The word villanelle derives from the Italian villanella, referring to a rustic song or dance, and which comes from villano, meaning peasant or villein. Villano derives from the Medieval Latin villanus, meaning a "farmhand". The etymology of the word relates to the fact that the form's initial distinguishing feature was the pastoral subject.

History

The villanelle originated as a simple ballad-like song—in imitation of peasant songs of an oral tradition—with no fixed poetic form. These poems were often of a rustic or pastoral subject matter and contained refrains. Prior to the nineteenth century, the term would have simply meant country song, with no particular form implied — a meaning it retains in the vocabulary of early music.

"J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle"

J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle:
Est-ce point celle que j'oy?
Je veus aller aprés elle.

Tu regretes ta femelle,
Helas! aussi fai-je moy,
J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle.

(I have lost my turtledove:
Isn't that her gentle coo?
I will go and find my love.
 
Here you mourn your mated love;
Oh, God—I am mourning too:
I have lost my turtledove.)

The first two stanzas of "Villanelle" by Jean Passerat (1534 – 1602), which established the modern form.

The fixed-form villanelle, containing the nineteen-line dual-refrain, derives from Jean Passerat's poem “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle”, published in 1606. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) suggests that this became the standard "villanelle" when prosodists such as César-Pierre Richelet based their definitions of the form on that poem. This conclusion is refuted by Kane, who argues that it was instead Pierre-Charles Berthelin's additions to Richelet's Dictionnaire de rimes that first fixed the form, followed a century later by the poet Théodore de Banville; his creation of a parody to Passerat’s “J’ay perdu …” would lead Wilhelm Ténint and others to think that the villanelle was an antique form.

Despite its classification and origin as a French poetic form, by far the majority of villanelles have been written in English. After the publication of Théodore de Banville's treatise on prosody "Petit traité de poésie française" (1872), the form became popularised in England through Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson. Gosse, Dobson, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang and John Payne were among the first English practitioners—theirs and other works were published in the first anthology of fixed-form poems, Gleeson White’s Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c. Selected (1887); overall it contained thirty-two English-language villanelles composed by nineteen poets.

Most modernists disdained the villanelle, which became associated with the overwrought formal aestheticism of the 1890s; i.e. the decadent movement in England. In his 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce includes a villanelle written by his protagonist Stephen Dedalus. William Empson revived the villanelle more seriously in the 1930s, and his contemporaries and friends W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas also picked up 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 wrote 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, as demonstrated in the section called "Variations on the Villanelle" that concludes Finch and Mali's anthology of villanelles.

Form

The villanelle consists of five stanzas of three lines (tercets) followed by a single stanza of four lines (a quatrain) for a total of nineteen lines. It is structured by two repeating rhymes and two refrains: the first line of the first stanza serves as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas, and the third line of the first stanza serves as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas. 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.

The pattern is below set against "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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)

The villanelle has no established meter, although most 19th-century villanelles have used trimeter or tetrameter and most 20th-century villanelles have used pentameter. Slight alteration of the refrain line is permissible.

Effect

With reference to the form's repetition of lines, Philip K. Jason suggests that the "villanelle is often used, and properly used, to deal with one or another degree of obsession" citing Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song" amongst other examples. He notes the possibility for the form to evoke, through the relationship between the repeated lines, a feeling of dislocation and a "paradigm for schizophrenia". This repetition of lines has been considered to prevent villanelles from possessing a "conventional tone" and that instead they are closer in form to a song or lyric poetry. Stephen Fry says that the villanelle "is a form that seems to appeal to outsiders, or those who might have cause to consider themselves as such", having a "playful artifice" which suits "rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or fatalism".

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.
• The villanelle written by Stephen Dedalus, protagonist in Joyce's novel "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", beginning with the line: "Are you not weary of ardent ways..." [1]

See also

• Villanella, (plural villanelle) an Italian song form with a rustic theme, mistakenly cited as the origin of the villanelle.
• Paradelle, a poetic form created by Billy Collins and originating as a parody of the villanelle.
• Terzanelle, a poetic form combining aspects of the terza rima and villanelle.

References

• Finch, Annie; Mali, Marie-Elizabeth, eds. (2012). Villanelles. Everyman's Library. ISBN 978-0-307-95786-3. 
• French, Amanda L. (2003). "The First Villanelle: A New Translation of Jean Passerat's 'J'ay perdu ma tourterelle' (1574)". Meridian 12. 
• French, Amanda L. (2004). "Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle". University of Virginia. 
• French, Amanda L. (2010). "Edmund Gosse and the Stubborn Villanelle Blunder". Victorian Poetry 48 (2): 243–266.  (subscription required)
• Fry, Stephen (2007). The Ode Less Travelled. UK: Arrow Books. ISBN 978-0-09-950934-9. 
• Gasparov, M. L. (1996). A History of European Versification. UK: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-815879-0. 
• Jason, Philip K. (1980). "Modern Versions of the Villanelle". College Literature 7 (2): 136–145.  (subscription required)
• Kane, Julie (2003). "The Myth of the Fixed-Form Villanelle". Modern Language Quarterly 64 (4): 427–43.  (subscription required)
• Kastner, L. E. (1903). A History of French Versification. UK: Clarendon Press. 
• Lennard, John (2006). The Poetry Handbook. UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-926538-1. 
• Padgett, Ron, ed. (2000). The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative. ISBN 0-915-92461-7. 
• Preminger, Alex (1993). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03271-8. 
• Strand, Mark; Boland, Eavan (2001). The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. US: Norton. ISBN 978-0-39-332178-4. 
• White, Gleeson, ed. (1887). Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, etc.. The Canterbury Poets. The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd. 

External links

• List of Villanelles at Poetry Foundation.
• Description and Examples of the villanelle from a web page for a course taught by poet Alberto Ríos.
• The Villanelle Sandwich from the webcomic Cat and Girl by Dorothy Gambrell.
• Poem of the Week May 27, 2008 from The Guardian.