How to Write a Villanelle
In brief: Nineteen lines, two refrains circling like tides. The villanelle is what obsession sounds like when it learns to sing.
The villanelle began as a loose Italian and French country song, a villanella, before nineteenth-century French poets fixed it into the strict shape we use now: five tercets and a final quatrain, nineteen lines in all, spun from just two rhymes and two refrains. In English it became the form of grief and defiance, the shape poets reach for when a feeling will not stop returning.
That returning is the point. The villanelle’s two refrain lines come back again and again, alternating, until the final stanza locks them together as a couplet. Done badly, this feels like a stuck record. Done well, each return lands differently because the stanzas between have changed the light around it, the way a phrase from an old argument means something new after a funeral.
The pattern, plainly
Label the first refrain A1 and the second A2; they rhyme with each other and with every “a” line. The middle line of every tercet takes the second rhyme, “b.” The blueprint runs: stanza one is A1, b, A2. Stanzas two through five are a, b, then a refrain, alternating A1 and A2. The final quatrain is a, b, A1, A2, closing the poem on both refrains stacked together for the first time.
So the entire poem uses only two rhyme sounds across nineteen lines, which is the form’s hidden difficulty in English. Before you write, list at least ten words for each rhyme sound. If you cannot fill the list, choose different refrains now, not at stanza four when it is too late and “orange” has ruined your evening.
The refrains repeat exactly in the strict form, but modern practice allows small shifts: a changed pronoun, a question mark where a period was, a single swapped word. These tiny mutations, used sparingly, can be devastating, because the reader hears both the memory of the line and its wound.
The classic beginner’s error is drafting refrains that lean on their neighbors: a line like “and that is why I never told her so” cannot survive being replanted four times, because it needs the sentence before it to mean anything at all. A refrain must be grammatically self-sufficient, a door that opens from both sides. Test each candidate by writing it alone on a blank page; if it stands there and still says something whole, it can bear the weight of its returns.
Build one, step by step
Everything depends on the two refrains, so audition them ruthlessly. Each must be a strong standalone line of roughly equal length, and together they should be in tension: a statement and its shadow, a promise and a doubt. “I learn the tide by letting small things go” against “what stays with me is what I came to know” gives the poem two poles to swing between.
Write the first tercet, then draft the poem middle-out: for each stanza, ask what new scene, memory or argument can re-earn the refrain that ends it. The fresh lines are not filler between choruses; they are the reason the chorus keeps meaning more. If a stanza exists only to reach its refrain, cut it open and put something real inside.
Save one revision pass just for the final quatrain. The closing couplet of refrains is the whole poem’s destination, and the two lines that precede it should tighten the spring. Read the ending aloud; if the double refrain feels inevitable and still surprising, you have built a true villanelle.
Common pitfalls
The first pitfall is choosing refrains that are merely pretty rather than load-bearing. A refrain must survive four returns; a decorative line dies by the second. Test each candidate by writing three different sentences that could sit before it. If it only fits one context, it is too rigid to live in this form.
The second pitfall is padding the “b” lines, treating them as connective tissue. In a poem with this much repetition, the non-repeating lines carry all the new information; they must be your sharpest writing, not your loosest. The third pitfall is monotony of tone. Vary the stanzas: one narrative, one image, one direct address. The refrains provide the sameness; everything else must provide the change.
Try It: your first villanelle
Step one: name the loop in flat prose. Say it is this: “Since my mother died, I keep leaving the kitchen light on at night, and I do not know how to stop.” Now carve two refrains from it that rhyme and argue. A1: “I leave the kitchen light on through the night.” A2: “Some part of me is still expecting light.” The first is the habit; the second is the hope hiding inside the habit. That gap is the poem’s fuel.
Step two: stock the treasuries before drafting. The “a” sound is “-ight”: night, light, flight, right, sight, white, quite, despite. For the “b” sound choose something roomy, say “-air”: chair, stair, air, prayer, wear, there, repair. Sixteen words on paper, none of them yet spent. This ten-minute chore is what saves you at stanza four, when a thin rhyme list starts writing the poem instead of you.
Step three: assemble the first tercet, A1, b, A2: “I leave the kitchen light on through the night. / The house has learned the shape of her old chair. / Some part of me is still expecting light.” Now stanza two must earn the return of A1 with something new, a memory, a phone call, a superstition, before the refrain lands again. Keep going, alternating refrains, and let the final quatrain stack them: habit first, hope last, together at last as a couplet.
Make it your own
Modern villanelles have been written about insomnia, dementia, deportation and love that will not resolve, precisely because the form enacts the experience of a thought you cannot put down. Choose a subject that genuinely loops in your life. The form will feel less like a puzzle and more like a confession with a floor plan.
And when yours is finished, consider entering it in a monthly contest such as Writory, where every poem is scored on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme. Few forms display structural command like a villanelle, and few deliver emotional accumulation so visibly; judges can watch the refrains gather weight stanza by stanza.
An opening tercet (A1, b, A2)
I learn the tide by letting small things go.
The shore keeps nothing that it does not need.
What stays with me is what I came to know.
The two refrains rhyme with each other (go, know) and sit in quiet tension; the middle line introduces the second rhyme sound (need).
The full skeleton at a glance
A1 b A2
a b A1
a b A2
a b A1
a b A2
a b A1 A2
Only two rhyme sounds across nineteen lines; the refrains alternate and finally meet as a couplet in the last stanza.
Exercises
- Write ten candidate refrain lines about something that haunts you, then pick the two that argue with each other best.
- List twelve rhymes for each of your two rhyme sounds before drafting a single stanza.
- Draft a villanelle where one refrain mutates by a single word in its final appearance, and note what the change does.
- Take a looping worry from your week and write the middle three tercets first, then discover which refrains they deserve.
Key takeaways
- A villanelle is five tercets and a quatrain built on two rhymes and two refrains.
- Choose refrains that are load-bearing and in tension with each other.
- The non-repeating lines must carry the new information; make them your sharpest.
- Each return of a refrain should mean more because of what came between.
- Tiny, rare mutations of a refrain can be more powerful than exact repetition.
Related lessons
Part of Forms of Poetry in the free Writory Academy: about 12 minutes, Advanced level, with a quiz that counts toward a signed certificate on the Certificate Track. By the Writory editorial team. Updated July 2026.