A villanelle is a nineteen-line fixed form consisting of five tercets (three-line stanzas) followed by a closing quatrain, built on two repeating refrains and two rhymes. The rhyme scheme is ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA, where the first and third lines of the opening tercet alternate as the final lines of subsequent stanzas and then appear together as the last two lines of the poem.
The form’s power comes from repetition with variation. Each time a refrain line returns, it arrives in a new context — the lines around it have changed, and so the refrain’s meaning shifts. This makes the villanelle suited to subjects of obsession, grief, circularity, and return. Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” are among the best-known English villanelles.
The villanelle originated as an Italian and French pastoral song form (villanella, from villano, peasant). Its modern fixed structure was codified in the nineteenth century and taken up seriously by English-language poets in the twentieth.