Villanelles and Triolets

En Francais

The two most widely known villanelles are Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Although these poems resonate with power and the suggestion of simplicity, the villanelle is a complex form to enter. That said, it provides a great opportunity to practise repetition and rhyme while finding a way for the repeated lines to be fresh and the rhymes subtle.

The villanelle has origins in Italy and France. One of the most popular poems by French poet Jean Passerat, “J’ai perdu ma tourtourelle” (“I Have Lost My Turtle Dove”), set the form into the shape we see today.

The villanelle is a poem of 19 lines broken into six stanzas. Each stanza contains three lines except for the last, which has four. The first line and last line of the first stanza are repeated throughout the poem in an aba rhyme scheme, until the final quatrain, which is in an abaa pattern:

1 2 3
4 5 1
6 7 3
8 9 1
10 11 3
12 13 1 3

Writing Exercise 1: Writing Rhyming Tercets

Have students write unlinked rhyming tercets (a series of three lines) in an aba rhyme scheme. The trick of rhyme in the 21st century is to be subtle. Often school English teachers ban rhyme from student work because they end up with mat/cat/fat lines. Strongly discourage this kind of rhyme and work on more subtle, enjambed lines.

Example #1: From City Park Merry-Go-Round by Eli Mandel (from In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry)

Freedom is seldom what you now believe.		 (end-stopped)
Mostly you circle round and round the park:
Night follows day, these horses never leave.

Though these lines are end-stopped with punctuation, the rhymes don’t stand up and scream at you.

From “Crows” by Carole Glasser Langille (from In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry)

What shall we do with a murder of crows  		(enjambed)
in Kentville? Thousands of birds.
When they light they’re as dark as their shadows.

Writing Exercise 2: Group Writing

Divide the students into groups of three. Each student should have a loose sheet of paper and write a single line on that sheet. Then pass to the next student and the next until there is a three-line poem. The second student doesn’t have to rhyme his or her line, but the third does, so that there is an aba rhyme pattern. When they are finished, each student will have the first stanza of a villanelle from which to build. Hopefully the lines are interesting. Students can decide who gets which tercet, and then continue on their own, or they could keep writing the villanelles together by writing a line, and passing it on.

Writing Exercise 3: The Villanelle

Now that the students have written one or two tercets in aba rhyme scheme, they are warmed-up for the trickier job of writing a villanelle. If they feel one of the tercets from Exercise 1 is strong, (line 1 and 3 especially), they could continue from that stanza to write the next five. If they aren’t so sure of the lines they have written, have them start anew. I think it is important to choose a topic that uses images rather than ideas and see how those repeated lines can subtly change from stanza to stanza.

Here is my own example based on a bicycle trip in Southeast Asia. I attempt to capture the images of the land set against a desire to remember the people. The two are linked through the repeated lines, and the repetitions have some slight variety to them in though/ through and I want to/want of:

An Adventurer’s Villanelle by Yvonne Blomer

I want to remember all the people;
it seems that is the heart of living,
though images of rock, dirt, hillside temple

resonate like tire-tread on new gravel.
In flashbacks, though, sometimes animals sing.
I want to remember all the people:

children who waved and that young man, teal-
suited.  As if to show us the way, pedalling 
through images of rock, dirt, hillside temple.

Some novel quote:  You are the traveller
now  as if an answer could be found, ringing
for want: remember all the people.

Remember the one woman, her heart stapled
to time: how loss could leave, leaving
through images of rock, dirt, hillside temple

buried in earth, her grief.  And our simple
game of cards, the shuffle, the dealing.
I want to remember all the people
through the images of rock, dirt, hillside temple.

Some of the earliest known triolets composed in English were written by the Benedictine monk Patrick Carey. A triolet wants to attempt to have a refrain that is natural with some flexibility to its meaning. This is not unique to the triolet; a line of poetry wants to have some variation of meaning depending on line and punctuation. In a triolet, however, the refrain heightens this ability and the desire to attain it. Here is Thomas Hardy’s "Birds At Winter":

Around the house the flakes fly faster, 	    A*
And all the berries now are gone' 		    B*
From holly and cotoneaster 			    a
Around the house. The flakes fly! – faster 	    A
Shutting indoors the crumb-outcaster 	            a
We used to see upon the lawn			    b
Around the house. The Flakes fly faster 	    A
And all the berries now are gone! 		    B 

*"A" denotes a line that is repeated
“a” denotes a new line that rhymes with the repeated line A
*”B” denotes a line that is repeated but doesn’t rhyme with A/a
“b” denotes a new line that rhymes with B

Hardy’s poem clearly outlines the form: one stanza of eight lines,
usually iambic (unstressed/stressed) trimeter (three feet), or iambic tetrameter (four feet).

“Vuillard Interior” by Elise Partridge (from In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry)

Against brown walls, the servant bends		
over the coverlet she mends –				
brown hair, brown flocking, a dun hand		
under the lamp, the servant bends			
over the coverlet she mends				
draped across her broad brown skirts;		
knotting, nodding the servant blends			
into the coverlet she mends.

Partridge’s poem doesn’t quite follow the rhyme scheme. She uses two refrains, “the servant bends” and “over the coverlet she mends,” which both of rhyme and are repeated. Then there are new rhyming lines that go with them and a single unrhymed line in “draped across her broad brown skirts.” Despite the more elaborate repetitions, this is a marvelous and simple poem that uses the refrain to propel the poem forward, to narrow the focus on this servant and, line by line, paint a clear, close picture.

Writing Exercise 4: Using Rhyme and Repetition With a Borrowed Line

Give each student a line from another poem (you can do this by selecting random lines from a collection or anthology, being sure to take note of the poet and poem for each line).

From the line: “This is a map to where I live”

1. Play with line breaks: This is a map/ to where I live
2. Come up with some rhymes – live, give, drive, sieve, alive …
3. Write three more lines in ABaA pattern:

This is a map to where I live:
the roads are narrow, the towns evade
like mothers whose love drives
this map to where I live.

Writing Exercise 5: The Triolet

This is a great one to do after the villanelle because it feels a bit freer and it is much smaller. Have the students stick to the rhyme scheme and keep their lines of similar length. Again, suggest they focus on something relatively small rather than a large idea or all-encompassing image for the triolet. A great way to help them get started is to come up with a list of possible titles, such as “First Time” or “Going” or “The red shoes” and have that as a jumping off spot. They may write their eight lines, and then have to do a lot of tightening and editing to pare the poem down and allow the refrains to shift slightly.

Suggested reading: Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, Ed. In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, Polestar: Vancouver, 2005
The Shapes of Our Singing by Robin Skelton, EWU Press, Washington, Spokane Washington.

Yvonne Blomer's poetry has won awards and been published internationally in such journals as Seam, The Rialto, Grain and The Antigonish Review in addition to being in The Best of Canadian Poetry in English published by Tightrope Books and in Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry published by Mother Tongue Publishing Ltd. Yvonne gained an MA in Poetry from The University of East Anglia in 2006. Her first book, a broken mirror, fallen leaf was short listed for The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.