Villanelle

The word villanelle derives from the Italian villanella, referring to a rustic song or dance, and which comes from villano, meaning peasant or villein.{{cite dictionary|title=Villanelle|url=http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=villanelle&allowed_in_frame=0|dictionary=Online Etymology Dictionary|access-date=15 October 2012}} Villano derives from the Medieval Latin {{Lang|la-x-medieval|villanus}}, meaning a "farmhand".{{cite dictionary|title=Villain|url=http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=villain&allowed_in_frame=0|dictionary=Online Etymology Dictionary|access-date=15 October 2012}} The etymology of the word relates to the fact that the form's initial distinguishing feature was the pastoral subject.

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.Kane 2003 p. 428 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.French 2010 p. 245 According to Julie Kane, the refrain in each stanza indicates that the form descended from a "choral dance song" wherein a vocal soloist—frequently female—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."Kane, Julie. "Introduction." Villanelles, ed. by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali.

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|title = "Villanelle (J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle)"

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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.)

|source = The first two stanzas of "Villanelle (J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle)" by Jean Passerat (1534–1602), which established the modern villanelle formFrench 2004 pp. 7–8

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The fixed-form villanelle, containing the nineteen-line dual-refrain, derives from Jean Passerat's poem "Villanelle (J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle)", published in 1606.French 2003 p. 1 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.Preminger 1993 p. 1358 This conclusion is refuted by Kane, however, 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;Kane 2003 pp. 440–41 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.French 2004 p. 30

Despite its classification and origin as a French poetic form, by far the majority of villanelles have been written in English. Subsequent to 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.Kane 2003 p. 441 Gosse, Dobson, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang, and John Payne were among the first English practitioners—theirs and other works were published in Gleeson White's Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c. Selected (1887),White 1887 pp. xiii–xiv which contained 32 English-language villanelles composed by 19 poets.Kane 2003 p. 442

Most modernists disdained the villanelle, which became associated with the overwrought formal aestheticism of the 1890s, i.e., the decadent movement in England.{{cite book |title=Decadent verse: an anthology of late Victorian poetry, 1872–1900 |year=2011 |publisher=Anthem Press |location=London, England |isbn=978-0-85728-403-7 |page=17 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7lKIiIzvi0kC&q=villanelle%20decadence&pg=PP1 |editor-first=Caroline |editor-last=Blyth}} 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,French 2004 p. 152 and his contemporaries and friends W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas also picked up the form.French 2004 p. 15 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.French 2004 p. 13 Since then, many contemporary poets have written villanelles, and they have often varied the form in innovative ways; in their anthology of villanelles (Villanelles), Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali devote a section entitled "Variations on the Villanelle" to such innovations.Fitch et al. 2012

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.Strand et al. 2001 p. 7 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 is:

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{{block indent|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)

}}

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Here, "a" and "A" lines rhyme, and A¹ and A² indicate two different refrains which are repeated exactly. It can be schematized as {{not a typo|A¹bA² abA¹ abA² abA¹ abA² abA¹A²}}.{{cite web|title=Poetic Form: Villanelle|url=http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5796|work=Poets.org|publisher=Academy of American Poets|access-date=2012-10-15|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121013133937/http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5796|archive-date=2012-10-13|url-status=dead}}

The villanelle has no established meter, although most 19th-century villanelles used trimeter or tetrameter and most 20th-century villanelles used pentameter. Slight alteration of the refrain line is permissible.Fry 2007, p. 225

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"Jason 1980 p. 141 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"Strand et al. 2001, p. 8 and that instead they are closer in form to a song or lyric poetry. Stephen Fry opines 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".Fry 2007, p. 228 (In spite of this, the villanelle has also often been used for light verse, as for instance Louis Untermeyer's "Lugubrious Villanelle of Platitudes".{{cite book |last=Cohen |first=Helen |title=Lyric Forms from France: Their History and Their Use |year=1922 |url=https://archive.org/details/lyricformsfromf01cohegoog |publisher=Harcourt Brace and Company }}French 2004 p. 147)

On the relationship between form and content, Anne Ridler notes in an introduction to her own poem "Villanelle for the Middle of the Way" a point made by T. S. Eliot, that "to use very strict form is a help, because you concentrate on the technical difficulties of mastering the form, and allow the content of the poem a more unconscious and freer release".{{cite web|title=Villanelle for the Middle of the Way|url=http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1720|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060724074018/http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1720|url-status=dead|archive-date=July 24, 2006|publisher=The Poetry Archive|access-date=7 February 2014}} In an introduction to his own take on the form, entitled "Missing Dates", William Empson suggests that while the villanelle is a "very rigid form", nonetheless W. H. Auden—in his long poem The Sea and the Mirror—had "made it sound absolutely natural like the innocent girl talking".{{cite web|title=Missing Dates|url=http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7503|publisher=The Poetry Archive|access-date=7 February 2014}}

{{main|Do not go gentle into that good night}}

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.{{Cite book |last=Thomas |first=Dylan |url=https://archive.org/details/collectedpoems0000thom/page/128/mode/2up |title=The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas |publisher=New Directions |year=1953 |location=New York |pages=128 |language=en}}

• "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas.{{cite web|title=Villanelle|url=http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/glossaryItem.do?id=8093|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100212181722/http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/glossaryItem.do?id=8093|url-status=dead|archive-date=February 12, 2010|publisher=The Poetry Archive|access-date=7 February 2014}}
• [http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0009/anagram3/ "Halt, Dynamos!"] by Francis Heaney, in his Holy Tango of Literature. (A parody of "Do not go gentle into that good night.")
• "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke.
• "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath.
• "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop.
• "If I Could Tell You (poem)" by W.H. Auden.
• [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Children_of_the_Night_%281921%29/The_House_on_the_Hill "The House on the Hill"] by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
• "Are you not weary of ardent ways," the villanelle written by Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It has been the subject of several critical analyses.{{cite journal |last=Benstock |first=Bernard |title=The Temptation of St. Stephen: A View of the Villanelle |journal=James Joyce Quarterly |year=1976 |volume=14 |issue=1 |pages=31–8 |jstor=25476025}} {{subscription required}}{{cite journal |last=Rossman |first=Charles |title=Stephen Dedalus' Villanelle |journal=James Joyce Quarterly |year=1975 |volume=12 |issue=3 |pages=281–93 |jstor=25487187}} {{subscription required}}
• "A Villanelle" by Agha Shahid Ali, from his collection "The Country Without a Post Office".{{Cite book|last=Ali|first=Agha Shahid|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L2XTb5YUxP0C|title=The Country Without a Post Office|publisher=Orient Blackswan|year=1997|isbn=978-81-7530-037-8|location=New Delhi|pages=61}}

• Villanella, an Italian song form with a rustic theme.
• 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.
• Villanelle (Poulenc), piece of chamber music composed in 1934. It was written for recorder and piano.

{{Reflist}}

{{refbegin|2|indent=yes}}

• {{cite book|title=Villanelles|year=2012|publisher=Everyman's Library|isbn=978-0-307-95786-3|editor1-last=Finch|editor1-first=Annie|editor1-link=Annie Finch|editor2-last=Mali|editor2-first=Marie-Elizabeth}}
• {{cite journal |last=French |first=Amanda L. |title=The First Villanelle: A New Translation of Jean Passerat's 'J'ay perdu ma tourterelle' (1574) |journal=Meridian |year=2003 |volume=12 |url=http://amandafrench.net/files/FirstVillanelle.pdf}}
• {{cite web |last=French |first=Amanda L. |title=Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle |url=http://amandafrench.net/files/Dissertation.pdf |publisher=University of Virginia |year=2004}}
• {{cite journal |last=French |first=Amanda L. |title=Edmund Gosse and the Stubborn Villanelle Blunder |journal=Victorian Poetry |year=2010 |volume=48 |issue=2 |pages=243–266 |doi=10.1353/vp.0.0104|s2cid=161093800 }} {{subscription required}}
• {{Cite book |last=Fry |first=Stephen |author-link=Stephen Fry |title=The Ode Less Travelled |publisher=UK: Arrow Books |year=2007 |isbn=978-0-09-950934-9}}
• {{Cite book |last=Gasparov |first=M. L. |author-link=Mikhail Gasparov |title=A History of European Versification |publisher=UK: Clarendon Press |year=1996 |isbn=978-0-19-815879-0 |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofeuropea00gasp }}
• {{cite journal |last=Jason |first=Philip K. |title=Modern Versions of the Villanelle |journal=College Literature |year=1980 |volume=7 |issue=2 |pages=136–145 |jstor=25111324}} {{subscription required}}
• {{cite journal |last=Kane |first=Julie |title=The Myth of the Fixed-Form Villanelle |journal=Modern Language Quarterly |year=2003 |volume=64 |issue=4 |pages=427–43 |url=http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_language_quarterly/v064/64.4kane.html |doi=10.1215/00267929-64-4-427|s2cid=161541323 }} {{subscription required}}
• {{Cite book |last=Kastner |first=L. E. |title=A History of French Versification |publisher=UK: Clarendon Press |year=1903 |url=https://archive.org/stream/historyoffrenchv00kastuoft#page/n5/mode/2up}}
• {{Cite book |last=Lennard |first=John |title=The Poetry Handbook |publisher=UK: Oxford University Press |year=2006 |url=https://archive.org/details/poetryhandbookgu00lenn_0 |url-access=registration |page=[https://archive.org/details/poetryhandbookgu00lenn_0/page/52 52] |isbn=978-0-19-926538-1}}
• {{cite book|title=The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms|year=2000|publisher=Teachers & Writers Collaborative|location=New York|isbn=0-915924-61-7|edition=2nd|editor1-last=Padgett|editor1-first=Ron}}
• {{cite book |last=Preminger |first=Alex |title=The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics |publisher=Princeton University Press |location=Princeton |year=1993 |isbn=0-691-03271-8 |url=https://archive.org/details/newprincetonency00alex }}
• {{Cite book |last1=Strand |first1=Mark |last2=Boland |first2=Eavan |title=The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms |publisher=US: Norton |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-393-32178-4}}
• {{Cite book|editor-last=White|editor-first=Gleeson|editor-link=Gleeson White|title=Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, etc.|publisher=The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd.|year=1887|series=The Canterbury Poets|url=https://archive.org/stream/balladesrondeau00whit#page/n5/mode/2up}}

{{refend}}

{{refbegin|indent=yes}}

• {{cite journal |last=McFarland |first=Robert |title=Victorian Villanelle |journal=Victorian Poetry |year=1982 |volume=20 |issue=12 |pages=125–138 |jstor=40002150}} {{subscription required}}
• {{cite journal |last=Pierce |first=Robert B. |title=Defining Poetry |journal=Philosophy and Literature |year=2003 |volume=27 |issue=1 |pages=151–163 |doi=10.1353/phl.2003.0030|s2cid=201779079 }} {{subscription required}}

{{refend}}

{{wiktionary|villanelle}}

• {{cite EB1911|wstitle=Villanelle |volume=28 |last= Gosse |first= Edmund William |author-link= Edmund William Gosse| page = 73|short=1}}
• [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/browse#forms=266 List of Villanelles] at Poetry Foundation.
• [http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/formsofverse/reports2000/page8.html Description and Examples] of the villanelle from a web page for a course taught by poet Alberto Ríos.
• [http://catandgirl.com/?p=728 The Villanelle Sandwich], a parody example from the webcomic Cat and Girl by Dorothy Gambrell.
• [https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/may/27/poemoftheweek40 Poem of the Week May 27, 2008] from The Guardian.

{{Poetic forms}}

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Category:Poetic forms

Category:French poetry

Category:Rhyme

Category:Stanzaic form