villanelles

Nineteen-line compositions

Villanelles are poems of nineteen lines with a strict form: five three-line stanzas followed by a four-line stanza, with only two rhymes throughout and two lines that repeat in a pattern.

The form creates an obsessive, circular quality suited to themes of loss or fixation.

Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" is the most famous English example.

form

tercets

Three-line poetic units

refrainAbstain from acting
ABALawyers' professional body
rhyme schemeSound-matching arrangement in poetry

repetition · quatrain · iambic pentameter · fixed form · stanzas · couplet · pentameter · meter · envoi · line breaks

literary

Dylan Thomas

AudenAnglo-American modernist poet
troubadoursMedieval lyric poet-musicians
RenaissanceEuropean cultural reawakening

Sylvia Plath · pastoral · anthology · workshop · contemporary poetry · tradition

craft

obsession

Persistent, intrusive preoccupation

circularityState of being round
incantationSpoken magical formula
revisionAltering to improve

constraint · musicality · echo · variation · meditation · haunting · intensity · compression · restraint · wordplay

themes

loss

Being without something

griefIntense sorrow from loss
mortalityState of eventual death
memoryMind's retention capacity

regret · passage of time · longing · absence · persistence · madness · love · farewell · elegy · nostalgia

villanelles

tercets

Dylan Thomas

obsession

loss

villanelles

Opposites

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