villanelle

I have indicated the structure of a villanelle below. a,A1,A2 rhyme, as do all b's. A1 and A2 are the theme lines that are repeated throughout. / indicates a new line.

A1/b/A2

a/b/A1

a/b/A2

a/b/A1

a/b/A2

a/b/A1/A2

The villanelle is a dainty thing, you bet: It's about as artificial and affected as poetic forms get, but in the right hands (William Ernest Henley above got away with it), it's a fine thing -- and a writer like Dylan Thomas can even get the real deep rumble in it, when he's in top form.

But oh, I'm not here to tell you about good poets. I'm here to tell you about a lousy one, James Joyce, a man who showed good judgement in turning to prose.

Joyce gives us this villanelle in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by way of showing just how pretentious and annoying that Young Man was:

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 langorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

The repetition saves a lot of typing. The Mass imagery is a bit weird, and the conflation of the BVM with the love object is downright peculiar. Well, we were all young once.

The villanelle, like the sestina, is really a metapoetic form, which is a fancy way of saying that it's so highly stylized that it ends up pointing out the artifice in all poetry.

What this really translates to is a form dearly beloved of conservative poetry MFAs, since it allows the author to simultaneously play off a tradition and mock it.  In this way the villanelle form is tiringly postmodern. Writing this type of poetry is actually fairly easy, since the only real prerequisites for carving out a villanelle are the ability to rhyme and a knack for iambic pentameter.  One does not need to be daring or even original when writing in such an elevated form - the simple fact that you've written a villanelle is enough to impress a good many readers and, of course, the occasional poetry journal editor.  Sure, you have to make sure it's not painful to read, but other than that you've got it made.  This is intended as a dig at the poetry establishment, not at any particular writer.

Most people, including poetry students, really get by on three villanelles: "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas, "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop, and "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke.  Obsessed fans of Sylvia Plath would really like to add "Mad Girl's Love Song" to that list, but it ain't happening since it's aggressively end-stopped, and the overuse of parentheses to get around what would otherwise be a cumbersome treatment of the repeated lines is widely considered cheating.

Vil`la*nelle" (?), n. [F.]

A poem written in tercets with but two rhymes, the first and third verse of the first stanza alternating as the third verse in each successive stanza and forming a couplet at the close.

E. W. Gosse.

© Webster 1913.