Villanelle

Despite its French origins, the majority of villanelles have been written in English, a trend which began in the late nineteenth century.

The villanelle has been noted as a form that frequently treats the subject of obsessions, and one which appeals to outsiders; its defining feature of repetition prevents it from having a conventional tone.

The word villanelle derives from the Italian villanella, referring to a rustic song or dance,[2] and which comes from villano, meaning peasant or villein.

[2] The villanelle originated as a simple ballad-like song—in imitation of peasant songs of an oral tradition—with no fixed poetic form.

[5][6] Prior to the nineteenth century, the term would have simply meant country song, with no particular form implied—a meaning it retains in the vocabulary of early music.

[10] The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) suggests that this became the standard "villanelle" when prosodists such as César-Pierre Richelet based their definitions of the form on that poem.

[2] This conclusion is refuted by Kane, however, who argues that it was instead Pierre-Charles Berthelin's additions to Richelet's Dictionnaire de rimes that first fixed the form, followed a century later by the poet Théodore de Banville;[11] his creation of a parody to Passerat's "J'ay perdu ..." would lead Wilhelm Ténint and others to think that the villanelle was an antique form.

[16] In his 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce includes a villanelle written by his protagonist Stephen Dedalus.

[22] With reference to the form's repetition of lines, Philip K. Jason suggests that the "villanelle is often used, and properly used, to deal with one or another degree of obsession"[23] citing Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song" amongst other examples.

[23] This repetition of lines has been considered to prevent villanelles from possessing a "conventional tone"[24] and that instead they are closer in form to a song or lyric poetry.

[24] Stephen Fry opines that the villanelle "is a form that seems to appeal to outsiders, or those who might have cause to consider themselves as such", having a "playful artifice" which suits "rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or fatalism".

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.