Terzanelle
Quick answer: The terzanelle fuses terza rima with the villanelle: 19 lines of travelling refrains. Learn Lewis Turco's rules and how to write your own terzanelle.
Most forms are old enough that their inventors are rumours. The terzanelle has a named parent and a birth decade: the American poet and form scholar Lewis Turco introduced it in the 1960s, splicing the interlocking tercets of Dante's terza rima onto the chassis of the villanelle. The result is nineteen lines long, like the villanelle, but where the villanelle repeats two fixed refrains, the terzanelle sets nearly every middle line travelling.
Poets who find the villanelle claustrophobic often love this form. The repetition is constant but the repeated material keeps changing, so the poem feels less like a locked room and more like a staircase where each landing echoes the last.
A modern hybrid with two famous parents
Terza rima, the aba bcb cdc chain Dante built the Divine Comedy from, contributes the interlock: each tercet's middle rhyme seeds the next tercet. The villanelle, the nineteen-line French-Italian form made famous in English by Dylan Thomas's poem urging his father against the dying of the light, contributes the length, the tercet count and the returning first and third lines.
Turco, whose Book of Forms became a standard reference for American poets, wanted the villanelle's music with more forward motion. The terzanelle delivers exactly that trade: fewer fixed anchors, more current.
The rules
A terzanelle is nineteen lines: five tercets and a closing quatrain. The middle line of each tercet returns as the third line of the following tercet. The poem's first and third lines both return in the final quatrain, which also inherits the fifth tercet's middle line. Using capitals for repeated lines, the scheme runs: A1 B A2, b C B, c D C, d E D, e F E, then the quatrain f A1 F A2 (Turco also sanctions f F A1 A2).
How to write one
Start with lines one and three, the only lines that must wait fourteen lines for their return. They should pair like a hinge and a door: related, not redundant, and each strong enough to end the whole poem, because together they will. Then write each tercet knowing its middle line is a promise; you will have to honour it three lines later in a new context.
The practical discipline is to draft middle lines that are grammatically self-sufficient and slightly ambiguous. When a line recurs, greet it with new surroundings that torque its meaning, the same skill pantoums demand, but here you also owe each repetition a rhyme partner. Work with a rhyme sheet, and read each tercet pair aloud before moving on; the echo should sound intended, never dutiful.
Temperament and typical failure
The terzanelle suits transformation: journeys, seasons turning, a relationship changing state, because its refrains move house every stanza. It handles obsession too, but with more hope than the villanelle; the changing repeats imply that even a stuck mind is travelling somewhere.
The typical failure is middle lines written as connective tissue, fine in passing, embarrassing on their command performance three lines later. If any middle line would look weak printed twice, it is not done. A subtler failure is botching the finale: the quatrain must make A1 and A2 feel like a homecoming, so revise backwards from it as ruthlessly as you revise forwards toward it.
What poets can take from this
- Write lines 1 and 3 first and confirm they can close the poem as a pair.
- Make every tercet's middle line strong enough to be quoted alone.
- Keep a running list of rhyme sounds; each new middle line opens a debt the next stanza must pay.
- Hold one steady line length throughout so the travelling refrains dock cleanly.
- Let the subject involve change or motion; the form's shifting echoes will amplify it.
- Revise the final quatrain first when editing, then adjust earlier stanzas to aim at it.
Try it yourself
Write a terzanelle that follows a single object, a coat, a key, a photograph, as it passes through three owners, letting each repeated line mean something different in the next pair of hands.
Questions
What is the difference between a terzanelle and a villanelle?
Both are nineteen lines in five tercets and a quatrain, but the villanelle repeats the same two refrain lines throughout, while the terzanelle repeats each tercet's middle line just once, in the following stanza, terza rima style. Only the first and third lines of a terzanelle return at the end.
Who invented the terzanelle?
Lewis Turco, the American poet and author of The Book of Forms, devised it in the 1960s as a deliberate hybrid of terza rima and the villanelle, and his specification remains the standard one.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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