📝 A fixed poem 👨‍🌾 A peasant 🎶 A rustic song

villanelle

1 9.9

A poem of nineteen lines with two repeated lines and a fixed rhyme pattern

noun
/ˌvɪləˈnɛl/

Literature

: villanela

She wrote a beautiful villanelle that captured the essence of love.

Let's see, I want to read a villanelle which is also fixed form.

Examples

One week she wrote a silly sonnet early in the morning, the next a villanelle.

Fiction book (2002)
Who knew that she would ever write a villanelle at her age?

Academic text (2007)
Let's see, I want to read a villanelle which is also fixed form.

Harvard University
She would like to explain the form of a villanelle to him, so he can get more out of it.

Academic text (2007)
In her villanelle "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop lists the losses that she has futilely tried to master over the course of a lifetime.

Academic text (2011)
Interestingly, it's virtually impossible to tell here which of the two poets might have been responsible for which of the lines that make up this villanelle.

Academic text (2009)
In poetry class, we studied how to write a villanelle with its unique structure and repeated lines.
After much practice, he finally composed his first villanelle during the workshop.

Surface Forms

villanelle singular

villanelles plural

Etymology

Villanelle comes from the Italian villanella, a small 'village song', and 19th-century poets used that song shape as a model for a strict poem with repeating lines. So a modern villanelle feels like a short, musical poem because its lines repeat like a song.