A visit to the villanelle

Alison Chisholm launches WM’s latest poetry competition with advice on crafting the form

Ask a group of writers to name the most popular traditional style of poetry, and you will find the sonnet high on the list. Ask a group of poets the same, and there will be more than a few who suggest the villanelle, the form required for our next competition. One of the older set forms, the villanelle began as a round song chanted by workers in the fields and as a choral dance. It once had a more fluid pattern, but nowadays it’s become fixed as a poem that relies on two rhyming refrains, and is usually written in iambic tetrameter or pentameter.

A villanelle has an odd number of tercets, (with five being the most popular), followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the poem are repeated alternately at the end of the tercets, and then appear as a rhyming couplet to close the quatrain, so it’s important to make sure the repeated lines will make sense when they appear together. The first line of each stanza rhymes with these refrains. The stanzas’ second lines all rhyme together, to give: A1 b A2 a b A1 a b A2 a b A1 a b A2 a b A1 A2

The quantity of repetition makes this form an ideal vehicle for a subject that involves persistence, obsession, or something preying on the mind, but it can also work with more general themes, as this example on the theme of Egyptian mythology demonstrates.

You will note in this example that some of the repetition is not exact. A touch of flexibility is permitted to aid the flow and logic of the sentences and to add a tiny hint of variety; but there is always the risk that any adjustments to the repeated lines will wander too far from the original and lose the dynamic of the form.

There aren’t any strict rules to govern the frequency or nature of substitutions. Here there are no adjustments to the wording of the first repeated line (A1). We see the second repeated line (A2), however, opening with whose on the first two occasions it appears, but with while and and on the other two. As villanelles are written in iambic metre, the opening syllable of the line is unstressed, so the altered words are unlikely to stand out in delivery. It’s up to the reader to decide whether these alterations are acceptable under the umbrella of the form.

Flexibility of grammar is positively encouraged. If the wording can remain the same while the sentence structuring adjusts the punctuation, it creates an elegant variant. Changing the comma to a full stop in the sixth line of the poem, and so beginning a new sentence mid-line, provides such a variation.

Yet another variation occurs in the stress pattern of lines fourteen and seventeen. The final feet of these lines are spondees, with two stressed syllables, grassland and wasteland, rather than the expected iambs. Again, it’s up to the reader to decide whether this device is a neat variant or breaks the pattern too severely.

Whenever a poetry form has repeated lines, the content should move onward between repeats, so that a slightly different nuance is attached to each. This moving forward tends to be subtle, and once more the individual reader will decide whether it works or not.

It’s clear, then, that while there are some neatly fixed rules to the management of villanelles, the reading of the poem is instrumental in working out how successfully the form has been used. An adjudicator will work with sound as well as appearance on the page, speaking out the potential winners to hear as well as see the words. If your villanelle reads beautifully by the eye and the ear, it might be the winner. Good luck.