Exercise Five: The Villanelle

The villanelle is a form that gives you lots of practice with finding rhyming words because a villanelle only works with two end rhymes (a and b) which are carried on throughout a very, very intricate pattern with six stanzas. In addition to the two rhymes, there are also two refrains which must be repeated throughout (A1 and A2). Though the pattern is a tight one, the lines themselves have no set count (such as iambic). Take a look at the pattern applied to Dylan Thomas' famous poem "Do not go gentle into that good night":

A1     Do not go gentle into that good night,
b        Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
A2     Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

a        Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
b        Because their words had forked no lightning they
A1     Do not go gentle into that good night.

a        Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
b        Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
A2     Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

a        Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
b        And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
A1     Do not go gentle into that good night.

a        Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
b        Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
A2     Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

a        And you, my father, there on the sad height,
b        Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
A1     Do not go gentle into that good night.
A2     Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The  real trick of the form is finding your end rhymes so...

Step One
Choose your two rhymes. Be sure that your "A" rhyme is something with lots of word possibilities. Think of something with a long "a" or "o" sound (day, pay, way, sway or mole, go, slow, whole).

Step Two (Option A)
Write your two refrains first. These should be fairly broad statements which can alter meaning from stanza to stanza.

Step Two (Option B)
Write your first stanza without thinking about what your refrains will be; this might allow you to create some surprising refrains.

Step Three
Start to construct your other stanzas - concentrate only on those end rhymes, even if you have to make lines that do not match in length. You can go back later and edit out words.

Step Four
Play with the form. Once you get the form down, you can then start to tweak it to do what you need for it to do. This is true for every form - there's no form police, no one is going to bust you for breaking a form. The only thing you must do is master the form - that is, know it - before you start tweaking. The only way to do that? Practice.

Take a look at how Elizabeth Bishop tweaks the form ever so slightly in her poem "One Art":

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.