The Villanelle
This morning it is raining. There is a smell in the air I associate with larger cities and their aging struts, domes, turrets and stones — terrible permanence? mellow decrepitude? unending yearning? — whatever it is, rain seems to release it. I smelled it last time I was in Chicago with Shelby. We had gone to see Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro" performed by the Chicago Opera Theater. It was marvelous! Mezzo soprano Sandra Piques Eddy played the "perpetually amorous" Cherubino. Wayne Koestenbaum insists that every Opera Queen must have a diva to obsess over. I think I shall choose Piques Eddy. She plays a hormonally-infatuated boy fabulously. It is this meditation on how aroused, feverish, intoxicated s/he always is that moved me: "and if no one is can hear me/ I speak of love to myself."
E se non ho chi m'oda,
Parlo d'amor con me!
I think that is how I should approach the villanelle; this strange form I am attempting to master. What do we know about the villanelle? Is it, as Shelby suggested said, an evil sonnet that kidnaps maidens? I found the following instructions in Strand and Boland's The Making of a Poem (2000):
* It is a poem of 19 lines.
* It has 5 stanzas, each 3 lines, with a final one of 4.
* The first line of the 1st stanza is repeated of the 2nd and 4th stanza.
* The 3rd line of the 1st stanza is repeated as the last line of the
3rd and 5th stanza.* These two refrain lines follow each other to become the second to
last and last lines of the poem.* The rhyme scheme is aba. The rhymes repeat according to the refrains. (page 5)
Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is one of the most famous villanelles I can think of. Unlike other forms of poetry that allow a narrative flow ("woke up, got out of bed/ dragged a comb across my head") the villanelle repeats its two key themes over and over. They say the form originated in Italian fields, with workers singing to each other and calling back a chorus. And it turns out almost everyone has written one. I found many examples at Villanelle Central. Looking at some of these poems, as with so much of modern poetry, certain poets have taken greater liberties with their diction and syntax in their refrains. That leads to an interesting question: why write a villanelle if you are not going to use the form as intended? I am not sure if there is an easy answer to this, since where the villanelle fails is when it is used,or so it seems, to convey some sort of narrative line and loses the power of its repetitious nature. Not all the poems at Villanelle Central, I think, are good. But it seems that there are so few good examples that poets and critics are eager to embrace anything, provided someone has called it a villanelle.