The villanelle is a type of formal poem—that is to say, a structure according to which elements such as poetic rhyme scheme, meter, and length are arranged. The villanelle has French roots, and the term at first referred to folk songs or to poems geared towards discussing pastoral topics. Scholars disagree regarding when the villanelle as a form, rather than a mere descriptive word for pastoral poetry, was standardized. Some believe that its current form was fixed as early as the sixteenth century, when Jean Passerat's poem "Villanelle" laid the groundwork for all future versions of the form. Others believe that it was not standardized until hundreds of years later in the nineteenth century. Today, as a popular form in English, the villanelle is no longer primarily used to discuss any given topic. Instead, writers from Dylan Thomas to Sylvia Plath to Elizabeth Bishop have made use of the form's restrictions in order to express a variety of ideas.
Though individual poets may choose to experiment with the form, making modifications as they see fit, the form calls for a nineteen-line poem composed of five tercets (three-line stanzas) followed by one quatrain (four-line stanza). The first and third lines of the poem become refrains, repeated throughout. The first line is used as the closing line of the second and fourth stanzas, and the third line becomes the closing line of the third and fifth. Both refrains, one after the other, close out the final quatrain and the poem as a whole. Traditionally, the villanelle follows an ABA rhyme scheme, in which the first and third line of every tercet rhyme, while the middle line in every tercet also rhymes. The final quatrain's rhyme scheme is ABAA: since not one but both refrains are repeated at the end of the poem, the final "A" rhyme is repeated twice. While villanelles don't necessarily have a given meter (poetic pattern of stress), it's common for villanelles written in English to use iambic pentameter. This is a meter in which every line contains five iambs (two-syllable phrases with the stress on the second syllable).
Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is among the most famous villanelles in English, but the form's immense popularity with English-speaking poets, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, means that some of the most widely anthologized and well-known poems today are written in this form. Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song" is a villanelle, as is Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." More recently, contemporary poets like Michael Luis Medrano have taken on the form. The themes of these poems are diverse, as are the innovations and adaptations various poets have brought to the villanelle. Some embrace a looser rhyme scheme. Others, including Elizabeth Bishop in "One Art," choose to inject minor alterations into their refrains rather than repeat them verbatim. Still, repetition is seen as the defining characteristic of the form, and some form of repeated refrain grounds every villanelle.
Depending on a poet's tone, content, and themes, the basic villanelle form can affect the reader's experience in a variety of ways. Its repetitious, musical qualities were used, especially in its earlier European iterations, to portray the rustic and the pastoral. Yet other poets have spotted other potential in the villanelle. Bishop, one might argue, uses the form in "One Art" to portray the back-and-forth of an internal conflict or argument. Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song" portrays a speaker questioning her own sanity, and in this poem, the villanelle's repeating, entangled refrains evoke the frustrating circularity of the speaker's psychological state. Meanwhile, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" makes use of the form to display its speaker's recurring, futile attempt to appeal to a dying loved one. By contrast, the incessant refrain in Medrano's "Villanelle," while also addressing death, emphasizes death's finality.
As with many poetic forms—including the sonnet, the sestina, and the haiku— the villanelle offers its practitioners a kind of freedom within its strictures. Poets have used the form as a prompt and a challenge, both making use of its rules and rebelling against those rules as it suits their artistic goals. As Philip K. Jason writes of the form, "the pattern, in itself, means nothing. Rather, it promises many things that poets who are sensitive to form can seize upon."
