Villanelle
Quick answer: A villanelle is a 19-line poem with two refrains and two rhymes across five tercets and a quatrain. Learn the pattern, famous examples and writing tips.
A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem built from five tercets and a closing quatrain, using only two rhyme sounds and two refrains. The first and third lines of the opening tercet take turns ending the following stanzas, then appear together as the poem's final two lines. The pattern runs A1 b A2, a b A1, a b A2, a b A1, a b A2, a b A1 A2.
The form's power lies in obsession. Because two lines keep returning, the villanelle suits subjects the mind circles and cannot put down: grief, loss, insomnia, stubborn hope. Each return lands in a new context, so the same words shift meaning as the poem tightens. Oddly, the strict form is a nineteenth-century codification of what began as a loose Italian rustic song; the rules poets sweat over were standardised long after the name existed, a fact worth knowing when someone insists the form is ancient.
How It Works
Everything depends on the two refrain lines, A1 and A2. They must rhyme with each other, stand as complete statements, and bear repetition four times each. The middle lines rhyme on a single b sound throughout, so you need six b words minimum.
Here is an invented refrain pair to show the required flexibility: 'The tide brings back what we refuse to keep' and 'Some doors are locked from both sides while we sleep.' Each reads as a sentence, each can follow different stanzas, and together they could close a poem. Refrains that only work in one context will strangle stanza four.
Where You Will See It
Jean Passerat's sixteenth-century French lament for a lost turtledove supplied the template that later theorists fixed into rules. In English, Edwin Arlington Robinson's 'The House on the Hill' from the 1890s showed the form could carry desolation. The twentieth century then produced the two most famous examples: Dylan Thomas's poem urging his dying father to resist the night, and Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art', which repeats that the art of losing is not hard to master while demonstrating, line by line, that the speaker does not believe it. Sylvia Plath's 'Mad Girl's Love Song' rounds out the modern canon.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Write the two refrains first and test them against each other aloud; if they cannot sit side by side as a closing couplet, start again. Choose a b rhyme sound rich in ordinary words. Allow yourself to vary the refrains slightly, a shifted pronoun or tense, as Bishop famously does, because rigid repetition can go dead by stanza five. Villanelles are also reliable contest performers when the refrains evolve rather than merely recur; judges scoring emotion and structure together, as Writory's do each month, tend to reward that movement.
What poets can take from this
- Draft refrains that are complete sentences with a strong final word, since they must rhyme eight times in total.
- Pick your b sound before drafting and list ten candidate words.
- Let the refrains mutate slightly as the poem progresses; small changes read as psychological movement.
- Keep the middle lines doing new work in each stanza rather than restating the refrains.
- Read Bishop's 'One Art' for variation and Thomas's villanelle for force, then aim between them.
Try it yourself
Write a villanelle about a habit you have tried to quit. Make one refrain the excuse and the other the truth, and let the final couplet force them into the same room.
Questions
What are the rules of a villanelle?
Nineteen lines: five tercets and a quatrain. Lines one and three of the first tercet alternate as the final lines of the following tercets and close the poem as a couplet. Only two rhyme sounds are used throughout.
Does a villanelle have to be in iambic pentameter?
No. The form fixes line count, rhymes and refrains but not metre. Pentameter is common in English examples, yet tetrameter and looser lines are entirely legitimate.
Why do poets write villanelles about grief and loss?
The returning refrains mimic how an obsessive thought keeps resurfacing, so the form enacts the psychology of mourning or fixation. Thomas and Bishop both proved the fit definitively.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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