Rondeau Redoublé
Quick answer: The rondeau redoublé weaves the four lines of its opening quatrain through five more stanzas. Learn this rare French form's pattern and how to write it.
A rondeau redoublé is a French form of six quatrains on two rhyme sounds in which each line of the opening stanza returns, in order, as the final line of stanzas two to five. The sixth stanza is entirely new and is followed by the rentrement, the opening phrase of the poem's first line, as a closing tail. The scheme runs A1 B1 A2 B2, then b a b A1, a b a B1, b a b A2, a b a B2, and finally b a b a plus the rentrement.
It is one of the rarest of the French repeating forms, rarer than the villanelle it superficially resembles, and poets attempt it partly for that reason. The opening quatrain is a promise the rest of the poem must keep four times over, which makes the redoublé a form about consequences: whatever you say first, you will have to stand behind.
How It Works
Everything hangs on stanza one. Its four lines must each be strong enough to conclude a later stanza, and they must alternate rhymes on just two sounds that will also serve twenty more lines. The middle stanzas then work like approaches in a villanelle: three new lines building a context in which the borrowed line can land as if freshly minted.
Take an invented opening line, 'You said the sea was nothing to be feared'. As A1 it must return to close stanza two, so that stanza has three lines to earn it: perhaps a childhood swimming lesson, perhaps a storm warning ignored. The form is a machine for testing first statements.
Where You Will See It
The form emerged in sixteenth-century France, with Clément Marot among its early practitioners, and was later catalogued by Théodore de Banville in his handbook of French verse. English examples are scarce enough to list: the best known is Dorothy Parker's 'Rondeau Redoublé (And Scarcely Worth the Trouble, at That)', whose subtitle tells you exactly how she felt about the labour, and contemporary formalists such as Wendy Cope have kept the form alive as a virtuoso set piece. If you write a good one, you join a short queue.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Draft the opening quatrain as four freestanding sentences, each with its own image, and check every line reads as an ending as well as a beginning. Choose your two rhyme sounds with unusual care, since they must supply the entire poem. Subjects built on repetition with variation, arguments with a partner, weather, insomnia, chores, give the returning lines natural re-entry points. And accept slant rhyme early; twenty-five lines on two exact sounds in English is a recipe for padded diction.
What poets can take from this
- Make each line of stanza one a complete sentence that could end a poem.
- Audit both rhyme sounds for at least a dozen usable words before starting.
- Let the middle stanzas change the meaning of the lines they inherit.
- Keep the closing rentrement short and let it land like a held door.
- Read Parker's example for tone and Cope's formal poems for engineering.
Try it yourself
Write the opening quatrain of a rondeau redoublé containing four things someone once told you about love. Then build the four middle stanzas that test each claim in turn.
Questions
How is a rondeau redoublé different from a regular rondeau?
The rondeau repeats only its opening phrase as a refrain across fifteen lines. The redoublé is longer, twenty-four full lines plus the rentrement, and recycles all four lines of its first stanza as later stanza endings.
Is the rondeau redoublé related to the villanelle?
Structurally they are cousins: both plant refrain lines early and force the poem to return to them. The redoublé plants four refrains rather than two and retires each after one return, so it feels less obsessive and more like an argument being settled point by point.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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