Artwork courtesy of Pixabay
(description courtesy of Shadow Poetry)
A Villanelle is a nineteen-line poem consisting of a very specific rhyming scheme: aba aba aba aba aba abaa.

The first and the third lines in the first stanza are repeated in alternating order throughout the poem, and appear together in the last couplet (last two lines).

One of the most famous Villanelle is "Do not go Gentle into that Good Night" by Dylan Thomas. (See Below)


(An excerpt from Wikipedia)
The villanelle has no established meter, although most 19th-century villanelles have used trimeter or tetrameter and most 20th-century villanelles have used pentameter. Slight alteration of the refrain line is permissible.

Despite its classification and origin as a French poetic form, by far the majority of villanelles have been written in English.[6] Subsequent to the publication of Theodore de Banville's treatise on prosody "Petit trait de poesie francaise" (1872), the form became popularised in England through Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson.[13] Gosse, Dobson, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang and John Payne were among the first English practitioners - theirs and other works were published in Gleeson White's Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c. Selected (1887), which contained thirty-two English-language villanelles composed by nineteen poets.

Most modernists disdained the villanelle, which became associated with the overwrought formal aestheticism of the 1890s, i.e., the decadent movement in England. In his 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce includes a villanelle written by his protagonist Stephen Dedalus. William Empson revived the villanelle more seriously in the 1930s, and his contemporaries and friends W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas also picked up the form. Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all. Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote villanelles in the 1950s and 1960s, and Elizabeth Bishop wrote a particularly famous and influential villanelle, "One Art," in 1976. The villanelle reached an unprecedented level of popularity in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of the New Formalism. Since then, many contemporary poets have written villanelles, and they have often varied the form in innovative ways; in their anthology of villanelles (Villanelles), Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali devote a section entitled "Variations on the Villanelle" to such innovations

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight


Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


Dylan Thomas

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