How to write a Villanelle
This article is for: Beginners and Intermediate, and maybe Advanced poets too!
The villanelle is a form that beginners often feel an urge to try.
This may be because of the influence of a couple of widely-read villanelles, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” and Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” These poems are both very poignant, and so many readers naturally want to see if they can harness that power.
However, when writers new to poetry attempt their own villanelle, they quickly find it’s not as easy as Bishop and Thomas make it look!
Nonetheless, a really well-crafted villanelle can be profoundly moving, so it’s worth the struggle.
And to make it easier, in this article, I want to cover:
The challenges of the villanelle form, and how to make one that works.
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Like the sestina and the pantoum, the villanelle is based on repetition.
Although it looks quite complicated at first, there are actually only a couple of things that repeat in this form:
Two entire lines come back several times (these are called the refrains).
One of two rhyme sounds is used at the end of every line.
So in some ways, the essence of the form isn’t that hard to master: the same things keep returning!
The pattern they come in makes things a bit harder, but if I break it down, hopefully it will still make sense.
The first stanza, which is 3 lines long, looks like this:
(stanza 1)
REFRAIN LINE 1— ending in rhyme sound A
A new line— ending in rhyme sound B
REFRAIN LINE 2— ending in rhyme sound A
In this way, the first stanza actually sets up the whole poem, by giving us:
The two refrain lines, as its first and third lines
The two rhyme sounds, A and B.
As you can see, the refrain lines rhyme with each other, and the line between them sets up the other rhyme sound.
Then we get four stanzas that share a pattern. They are also 3 lines long, and their final line is one of the refrains:
(stanza 2)
A new line— ending in rhyme sound A
Another new line— ending in rhyme sound B
REFRAIN LINE 1— ending in rhyme sound A
(stanza 3)
A new line— ending in rhyme sound A
Another new line— ending in rhyme sound B
REFRAIN LINE 2— ending in rhyme sound A
(stanza 4)
A new line— ending in rhyme sound A
Another new line— ending in rhyme sound B
REFRAIN LINE 1— ending in rhyme sound A
(stanza 5)
A new line— ending in rhyme sound A
Another new line— ending in rhyme sound B
REFRAIN LINE 2— ending in rhyme sound A
In each case, the first and third lines rhyme, and the middle line rhymes with the middle line of stanza 1.
The poem concludes with a 4-line stanza, that actually follows the same structure as those other stanzas, but then ends with both the refrain lines:
(stanza 6)
A new line— ending in rhyme sound A
Another new line— ending in rhyme sound B
REFRAIN LINE 1— ending in rhyme sound A
REFRAIN LINE 2— ending in rhyme sound A
Breaking it down like this, I hope that the form does not seem too complicated. As I said, once you get stanza 1 set up, things just keep coming back!
Problems and challenges with the villanelle
Having made sense of the rules of the form, we can now explore what makes it a challenge. Because:
All that repetition makes the form easy to remember, but hard to write in.
1. Refrains as roadblocks
The first difficulty of the villanelle is that:
The meaning of the poem gets distorted by the refrains.
Those two refrain lines get used four times each, for a total of 8 lines, in a poem that’s only 19 lines long. That means that, as soon as you’ve chosen the refrains, almost half of the meaning of the poem is fixed.
And that makes it difficult to write the poem in a natural way, since in stanzas 2 through 6 you keep having to come back to the same meaning again and again! Just as you get on a roll with your ideas, you bang up against another of those darn refrains, that somehow you have to fit into what you wanted to say.
And all too often, it doesn’t fit very well!
To cope with this, sometimes villanelle learners put the refrains in the right places, but basically ignore their meaning.
They focus on making the first two lines of each stanza say what they want, then just throw a refrain and hope it connects!
While this strategy is completely understandable, it makes for meaningless repetition.
The refrains don’t seem to have any purpose, and the poem becomes slow and tedious.
Even if you manage to avoid these pitfalls, there are still two more challenges posed by the refrains:
First, it can be hard to make the poem move forward. Instead of the poem taking readers on some kind of a journey, in the villanelle it’s all too easy to end up circling around and around.
And lastly, it can be extremely difficult to make the final couplet—both refrains next to each other— into a strong ending. After all, this is the fourth time the reader has seen those two lines! So they certainly don’t have any surprise value any more. And they may accentuate the sense that the poem has gone nowhere.
In other words, the refrains need careful handling!
Fortunately, there are some ways to do that. I’ll go over them soon, but first, let’s briefly mention the villanelle’s other big problem.
2. Relentless Rhyme
As if the refrains weren’t enough to drive you crazy, at the same time you’ve also got to deal with the rhymes.
One rhyme sound gets used six times, while the other comes up seven times.
In some languages, like Italian, finding six or seven rhyme for the same sound is no problem at all. But in English, getting that many rhymes out of one sound is tough.
And again, this tends to disfigure the poem’s meaning. Villanelle learners can add all kinds of odd phrases to make the rhymes work!
How to make the villanelle work for you
The good news about villanelles is that there are a few easy and practical strategies that allow you to overcome all the problems of the form.
Here they are!
Flexible refrains
All the problems of refrains that I mentioned above disappear if you treat the refrains with creativity and playfulness.
If you view them as fixed lumps that you have to drop into the poem every so often, then yes, they’re going to be trouble.
But if you use all the resources of your inventiveness on them, you can even discover ways they can give you useful ideas and drive the poem forward.
1. Change the grammar of refrains
Strictly, the words of the refrains are meant to remain the same. But you can change the sentences they are part of.
Firstly, you can make use of words that can do different grammatical jobs.
Dylan Thomas does this in “Do Not Go Gentle In That Goodnight”:
The first time “Do not go gentle into that good night” is used, it is a command.
But the next two times it comes up, it is part of a statement, like this: “they / Do not go gentle into that good night.”
This gives Thomas more options: He can use the exact same refrain to command his father not to die gently, and to give examples of others who did not. Thus, the repetition becomes more meaningful.
You can also vary the grammar of a refrain by changing where you put punctuation.
A villanelle that makes full use of this trick is “After Proteus” by Henry Walters. Here are the four occurrences of one of his refrains:
“the river, too. The names for everything,”
“the river to the names for. Everything”
“the river. To the names for everything,”
“the river to the names for every thing.”
Same words (more or less, except for the “too”), but different meaning each time—just by ending the sentence in new places!
This allows Walters to make the line mean something quite different each time he uses it. Thus, his refrains are always fresh, and always relevant.
2. Change the words of refrains
Although the strict villanelle form says you have to use the exact same words each time, in practice that rarely happens these days. (“After Proteus” is a rare exception, which just shows how skilled Walters is.)
So another way to gain flexibility is to change the words in the refrains.
Here are four refrains from “His and Hers” by Diane Gilliam Fisher:
loves how every night in their bed he lies
In the night, in their bed, she sees he lies
She’s sure every night in their bed he lies
Every night in their bed, he lies.
Here, you can clearly tell that each line is the same refrain, but there are several small differences—“loves how,” “she sees,” “She’s sure.” Using these, the poet significantly changes the meaning of the refrain each time it comes back. At the start, it expresses happy new love, but by the end it’s the opposite—a broken relationship.
Thus Fisher makes all the refrains meaningful, and again, they never get stale.
3. Let the refrains lead you
If you change your grammar and your words, the refrains can become not only more malleable, but also potentially a great source of ideas.
It’s not the case that the refrains always need to fit into a meaning you have pre-planned. Ideally, they would also suggest new content you can include.
Consider Henry Walter’s refrain. Let’s suppose he started with “the river to the names for every thing.”
Then let’s imagine he wrote down a list of other possibilities:
the river. To the names for every thing
the river too. The names for every thing
the river too, the names. For every thing
the river to the names. For every thing
the river to the names for. Every thing
At that point, he no doubt started to see other ways he could use this line. A way that he might continue the sentence “To the names for every thing....” for example, or how he might end one with “the river too.”
Thus, the possible refrains almost certainly added to his ideas for the poem.
And this is an excellent way to use them, because then they become organically part of the poem that grows around them.
Plan your rhymes, and consider slant rhyme
If you need just one rhyme, you might be able to make a good one just by thinking of one or two possibilities.
But if you need 6 or 7 rhymes, you’d better do some planning ahead of time!
One the one hand, try to end on words that already have a lot of rhymes.
Fisher uses “lies,” which has upwards of 30 rhymes, so she has no trouble finding rhymes that help her tell her story: “shies,” “otherwise,” “eyes,” and more, all fit in naturally.
But for her other rhyme, she used “ring.” Ring only has about a dozen full rhymes, which makes things more complicated—especially since it’s hard to see how she could easily have used “ding” or “bing”!
So instead, she brings in slant rhymes.
As well as “sing,” a full rhyme, she uses “sleeping,” “working,” “anything,” and “nothing,” which are all slant rhymes for “ring.” They sound just fine, and allowing herself “-ing” words vastly increases her range of possibilities.
Slant rhyme is super useful for villanelles, and it will make your experience much happier. If you’re not sure what they are or how to find them, please see this article.
Use enjambment
You may have noticed that both Walters and Fisher made liberal use of enjambment in their refrains. In fact, enjambment is a crucial element of a successful villanelle.
Enjambment means keeping the sentence going past the end of a line, which Walters does when he ends the refrain with “The names for everything, / however short or shy...” and which Fisher uses to lead into the start of this refrain: “she / loves how every night in their bed he lies...”
Without enjambment, you really are very limited in your choices. You have to make each refrain stand alone, and you have to make every line end at its rhyme word. Then they are all going to land like bricks!
With enjambment, you can weave refrains and rhyme words into much longer and more flexible sentences. This is not only easier to write, but also leads to a more subtle and satisfying reading experience too.
Make sure there’s progression, and a real ending
I’ve mentioned a few times how important it is to avoid going around in circles in the villanelle, so I won’t labor the point here. But do check that your ideas really move forward as the poem goes along.
Each stanza should add something different, ideally.
And at the end, aim to do more than just flop over the finish line.
In other words, don’t just plonk your two refrains next to each other and hope they work. Change them as much as you need in order to make the ending a true ending. Make the last couple different, make it vivid, make it the most crucial piece of meaning in the whole poem—not an afterthought.
What can the villanelle teach us about poetry in general?
Form can be flexible
Anytime you learn a new form, don’t follow the rules like a servant. Look for ways to adapt them to serve you. This is a more creative way to use form.
Form can give you new directions
At the same time, don’t underestimate how much impetus you may get from following the form. Being forced to make each refrain meaningful is an example of how a form stimulates new creativity, if you approach the rule with openness.
Balancing form and freedom is an endless dance
The key to loving form for a lifetime, I find, is dancing back and forth between approach 1 and approach 2. Sometimes you decide to bend the form, and sometimes you let the form bend you—and like the best dancing, it’s dynamic, surprising, and delightful!
Next Steps
There of course many ways to write a villanelle. But here is one I’ve used and shared with students.
First, find a topic. If you don’t already have this, here are two possibilities:
—Something that recurs or has recurred in your life. This could be a situation, a thought or feeling, a life event (birth, love, death), or maybe a physical object.
—A subject that can be looked at from multiple angles or through different examples (like the way Bishop explores different kinds of loss in “One Art”).Next, find possible refrains.
Make some notes on your topic, or even better, freewite on it.
Then pull out some phrases that you like, and explore how you might vary:
—Their grammar
—Where punctuation goes
—Their wording.Next, prepare some “A” rhymes. The “A” rhyme is the sound that ends both of the refrains.
—Take the end word of one of your possible refrains, and find a large number of rhymes and slant rhymes for it.
—Repeat this with at least one other possible end word, and maybe several.
—Find pairs of rhyming words that can go at the ends of two of your possible refrains, without distorting the meaning.Based on what you find in stages 2 and 3, choose two refrains to work with.
Create stanza 1 by adding a third line between Refrains 1 and 2.
Find a bunch more rhymes, this time for the middle line! (This is the “B” rhyme.)
Draft the rest of the poem. As you do, keep looking at:
—the possible variations your created for your refrains
—the lists of possible rhymes.
Allow these to give you new ideas.
Also try to tackle a new topic (or sub-topic) in each stanza.Finish the poem by making sure that your last couplet—Refrain 1 then Refrain 2—says something both new and important. Change the refrains to make this possible!
