Villanelles by sylvia plath biography

Fixed verse form; nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain

This article is about the poetic form. For the fictional character in Killing Eve, see Villanelle (character).

For other uses, see Villanelle (disambiguation).

A villanelle, also known as villanesque,^[1] is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain.

Villanelles by sylvia plath biography

There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form.

The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.

The form started as a simple ballad-like song with no fixed form; this fixed quality would only come much later, from the poem "Villanelle (J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle)" (1606) by Jean Passerat.

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