The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

‘What’s a villanelle?’

‘Well, it’s a pastoral Italian form from the sixteenth century written in six three-line stanzas where the first line of the first stanza is used as a refrain to end the second and fourth stanzas and the last line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third, fifth and sixth,’ I replied with fluent ease.

You have never heard such a snort of derision in your life.

‘What? You have got to be kidding!’

I retreated into a resentful silence, wrapped in my own thoughts, while this friend ranted on about the constraint and absurdity of writing modern poetry in a form dictated by some medieval Italian shepherd. Inspiration suddenly hit me. I vaguely remembered that I had once heard this friend express great admiration for a certain poet.

‘Who’s your favourite twentieth-century poet?’ I asked nonchalantly.

Many were mentioned. Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, Dylan Thomas.

‘And your favourite Dylan Thomas poem?’

‘It’s called “Do not go gentle into that good night”.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Does it have any, er, what you might call form particularly? Does it rhyme, for instance?’

He scratched his head. ‘Well, yeah it does rhyme I think. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and all that. But it’s like–modern. You know, Dylan Thomas. Modern. No crap about it.’

‘Would you be surprised to know’, I said, trying to keep a note of ringing triumph from my voice, ‘that “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a straight-down-the-line, solid gold, one hundred per cent perfect, unadulterated villanelle?’

‘Bollocks!’ he said. ‘It’s modern. It’s free.’

The argument was not settled until we had found a copy of the poem and my friend had been forced to concede that I was right. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is indeed a perfect villanelle, following all the rules of this venerable form with the greatest precision. That my friend could recall it only as a ‘modern’ poem with a couple of memorable rhyming refrains is a testament both to Thomas’s unforced artistry and to the resilience and adaptability of the form itself: six three-line stanzas or tercets,¹¹ each alternating the refrains introduced in the first stanza and concluding with them in couplet form: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 theyDo not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir 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 sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the 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.

The conventional way to render the villanelle’s plan is to call the first refrain (‘Do not go gentle’) A1 and the second refrain (‘Rage, rage…’)A2. These two rhyme with each other (which is why they share the letter): the second line (‘Old age should burn’) establishes the b rhyme which is kept up in the middle line of every stanza.

Much easier to grasp in action than in code. I have boxed and shaded the refrains here in Derek Mahon’s villanelle ‘Antarctica’. (I have also numbered the line and stanzas, which of course Mahon did not do):

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I hope you can see from this layout that the form is actually not as convoluted as it sounds. Describing how a villanelle works is a great deal more linguistically challenging than writing one. Mahon, by the way, as is permissible, has slightly altered the refrain line, in his case turning the direct speech of the first refrain. There are no rules as to metre or length of measure, but the rhyming is important. Slant-rhyme versions exist but for my money the shape, the revolving gavotte of the refrains and their final coupling, is compromised by partial rhyming. The form is thought to have evolved from Sicilian round songs, of the ‘London Bridge is falling down’ variety. In the anthologies you will find villanelles culled from the era of their invention, the sixteenth century, especially translations of the work of the man who really got the form going, the French poet Jean Passerat: after these examples there seems to be a notable lacuna until the late nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde wrote ‘Theocritus’, a rather mannered neo-classical venture–‘O singer of Persephone!/Dost thou remember Sicily?’ (I think it best to refer to villanelles by their refrain lines), while Ernest Dowson, Wilde’s friend and fellow Yellow Book contributor, came up with the ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’ which is a much bouncier attempt, very Tudor in flavour: ‘I took her dainty eyes as well/And so I made a Villanelle.’

But it is, perhaps surprisingly, during the twentieth century that the villanelle grows in popularity; besides those we have seen by Mahon and Dylan Thomas, there are memorable examples you may like to try to get hold of by Roethke, Auden, Empson, Heaney, Donald Justice, Wendy Cope and a delightful comic one candidly wrestling with the fiendish nature of the form itself entitled ‘Villanelle of Ye Young Poet's First Villanelle to his Ladye and Ye Difficulties Thereof’ by the playwright Eugene O’Neill: ‘To sing the charms of Rosabelle,/I tried to write this villanelle.’ But for a reason I cannot quite fathom it is female poets who seem to have made the most of the form in the last fifty years or so. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ is especially poignant, given what we know about the poet’s unhappy end: ‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead./(I think I made you up inside my head)’. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ is as fine a modern villanelle as I know and Marilyn Hacker has also written two superbly ambiguous love villanelles. Carolyn Beard Whitlow’s ‘Rockin’ a Man Stone Blind’ shows how a medieval Mediterranean pastoral form can adapt to the twentieth-century African American experience. I like the Porgy and Bess-style rhythms:Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line,Night wind blowin’ against sweet, yellow thighs,Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.Man smell of honey, dark like coffee grind;Countin’ on his fingers since last July.Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.Mister Jacobs say he be colorblind,But got to tighten belts and loosen ties.Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.Winter becoming angry, rent behind.Strapping spring sun needed to make mud pies.Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.Looked in the mirror, Bessie's face I find.I be so down low, my man be so high.Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.Policeman’s found him; damn near lost my mind.Can’t afford no flowers; can’t